The Great Sedition Trial of 1944: 

          A Personal Memoir

The Great Sedition Trial of 1944: A Personal Memory

A Mockery of Justice -The Great Sedition Trial of 1944 By Michael Collins Piper & Ken Hoop

The ADL and the Great Sedition Trial

PROJECT MEGIDDO OF '99, THE "GREAT SEDITION TRIAL" OF `44 : WHAT ARE THE PARRALLEL LESSONS

THE ADL AND NEW NAZISM

      The Great Sedition Trial of 1944: 

      A Personal Memoir

• Paper Presented to the Sixth International Revisionist Conference.

I have the honor to discuss an historical event in which I played a personal role, the notorious Sedition Trial of 1944. As a Christian I have long since forgiven those who were responsible for instigating this persecution of American citizens and I have no axes to grind with anyone. Some of what I have to tell is merely personal recollection while some is indisputable fact. Historians must make these distinctions. I write here as a witness to history.

Before discussing the trial itself it is necessary to outline some background. I've always been idealistic and history was my favorite subject in school. Accordingly, in my youth I was greatly impressed by Edward Bellamy's book Looking Backward. I became an ardent socialist and joined the Socialist Party, which was then America's third largest party. Still, I was also nationalistic and supposed that socialism would be best for our country and its people. World government was not an issue and I'm sure that most of the socialist followers of Eugene V. Debs would have opposed it. We were concerned about America and its economic system, which was then about the most ruthless monopoly capitalism one can imagine.

Consequently, I was also very enamored of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In the belief that the Roosevelt program fulfilled our hopes (but unaware of his world government philosophy), our California state Socialist leader, Upton Sinclair, joined the Democratic party and ran for Governor. I was the last remaining registered Socialist in San Bernardino County but finally gave in and, following Sinclair's lead, joined the Democrats. For two years I served as president of the largest Democratic Club in California. While the great depression was at its worst, I worked for several years as a'W.P.A. supervisor. I believe that Roosevelt did do some good in emergency legislation, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, banking reforms to protect citizens' savings, Social Security and the like.

My interest in political affairs never waned. I wanted to hear both sides of every issue. Accordingly, you might see me at a Communist rally, a Klu Klux Klan conclave, a Townsend old-age speech, a Jewish anti-Nazi gathering or a Silver Shirt meeting. Incidentally, the Silver Shirt leader, William Dudley Pelley, was one of my co-defendants in the Sedition Trial several years later, along with two Los Angeles German-American Bund leaders. Before the trial I had never met Pelley personally nor corresponded with him, and had only been introduced to the German-American Bunders at their open meeting. Yet I was later accused of conspiring with them. Actually, at that time I was simply a New Deal Democrat interested in what was going on in the country politically.

I've always been a little slow about jumping to conclusions, but as Chesterton once said, "The object of opening the mind is to close it again on something solid." Once thoroughly convinced of the rightness of a thing, I have jumped in on what I believe to be right with enthusiasm. It was after war broke out in Europe that I first began having doubts about Roosevelt's honesty. I had already become what is called a "middle of the roader" politically and economically, and I now found myself more and more sympathetic to those who stood for rugged individualism, disliked regimentation, and opposed Roosevelt's cleverly disguised efforts to get the United States involved in a foreign war that was none of our business. Because the President would say one thing to the people and do exactly the opposite, I frankly came to detest the ground he walked on. Moreover, I became convinced that there really was an international conspiracy that was using our nation as a pawn, as had been the case in World War I. Since I had no access to the press at that time, I began publishing a newsletter.

Politics indeed makes strange bedfellows. After Hitler and Stalin concluded a treaty, American Communists enthusiastically endorsed those of us who opposed getting into the European war between Germany and the British-French alliance. The Communists even stomached the Jewish issue that some of us raised and many Jewish Communists, who wanted the United States to join the war against Hitler, left their party. All that changed overnight, however, when war broke out between Germany and Russia. The Communists then turned against us with a vengeance and eagerly backed F.D.R. and American participation in the war to save the Soviets. Those of us who had been anti-war from the beginning were now even more set against such an adventure. England and France were now practically out of the conflict. Now let the Nazis and Russians slug each other while the United States remained neutral, we felt. When the smoke cleared neither of the big European powers would have much strength left, there probably wouldn't be any Soviet Union, and the United States would emerge unscathed with not a man lost. We could also resolve our own domestic problems without attention being diverted by war. I wrote one article after another and sometimes ghost-wrote speeches for visiting speakers of the American First Committee, of which I was a member. Apart from the Democratic and Socialist parties, it was the only political organization I ever joined. I also tried to organize a correspondence circle of anti-war people to be called the Social Republic Society, but it was never amounted to anything. Or so we thought.

After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, which even then many of us claimed Roosevelt and Churchill had schemed to bring about (and which is now known fact), America Firsters found themselves in hot water. All of our political supporters in Congress and elsewhere disappeared as if by magic. Even Hamilton Fish, Robert Taft, Burton Wheeler and Claire Hoffman were misled and carried away by the Administration-created hysteria. They did not even suspect Roosevelt's skullduggery in bringing about the Pearl Harbor attack. They all jumped aboard the war bandwagon, except for a very few diehards, of whom I was one. To us, if a thing was wrong in principle before an official declaration of war by the President, it was just as wrong afterwards. Despite our limited numbers and political insignificance, some of us then took it upon ourselves to tackle one of the most improbable jobs imaginable -- a Peace Offensive. We believed that although America had made a mistake in getting into the European inferno, we could still negotiate an honorable peace and save millions of lives. I then suddenly found myself thrust into national prominence and my name appeared in several major newspapers. I was actually proposed as a presidential candidate by Edward Price Bell, a retired editor of the Chicago Daily News. Although Bell was prominent in the Republican party, he was just as opposed to the GOP's Wendell Willkie as he was to the Democrat Roosevelt. He opposed American subservience to foreign interests as much as I did. His article in the Saturday Spectator brought me directly to Roosevelt's attention and triggered my speedy political demise.

I was quickly subpoenaed to appear before a California State Senate anti-subversion committee headed by Senator Jack Tenney, before which I testified and was labeled a "hostile witness." Years later, after he became enlightened, Tenney personally apologized to me. After that subpoena a U.S. marshall served me with a "Presidential Warrant" signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt which ordered me to appear before a grand jury in Washington D.C. I tore up the warrant and told the marshal to tell F.D.R. to go to hell, where he belonged. Roosevelt had no more authority to order me around than any other citizen. Accordingly, a few days later a marshall served me with a proper subpoena to appear and I promptly left for Washington. I had never been in the capital before.

At the same time, Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson and a raft of others went after me over the radio. Pearson called me a "fascist" and Winchell constantly demanded, "Why doesn't somebody do something about it?" When I arrived in the capital, the Washington Post kept up a page-one running attack against me as a "revolutionist." The other Washington papers were more restrained, although one headlined me as a "Jap apologist," probably because of some things I had written in defense of Japanese-American citizens who had been rounded up and sent to concentration camps without any semblance of legality. Being called a "Jap apologist" didn't make me any more popular with the average American. In those days most Americans were hysterical about anything Japanese after Pearl Harbor, not knowing that their own President was responsible for it. I was practically without friends. Anti-war members of Congress whom I had loyally supported pretended that they had never heard of me. People who had known me for years were afraid to be seen with me. Quite frankly, I felt depressed and disillusioned.

The Washington grand jury session was pretty fiery. A number of people I had heard of but had never met were there from all over the country, including Charles B. Hudson, Gerald B. Winrod (a minister and a spokesman for Social Justice and Father Charles Coughlin), Congressman Claire Hoffman of Michigan, and many others. When I got into a row with the federal prosecutor, William Power Maloney, and was cited by the grand jury for contempt, newspapers were full of it and my home town paper, the San Bernadino Sun-Telegram, ran a screaming headline: "Baxter Defies Federal Grand Jury."

An interesting feature of the grand jury investigation was when a bailiff entered the witness room and called out several times, "Jefferson Breem." Jefferson Breem was there, all right, but he didn't answer. That was because he was really a reporter for the Washington Post named Dillard Stokes. It was Stokes who wrote the Post stories which referred to me as a "revolutionist" and smeared me and other witnesses from pillar to post. "Jefferson Breem" was one of many people who had written to me to ask for copies of my writings. After all, none of my work was secret and my writings were in some libraries. The Hoover Library of Stanford University, for example, had requested and received my literature. Anyway, when the grand jury later indicted about 30 of us who had been witnesses, accusing us of sedition, it was largely on the basis of literature we had sent to Stokes, alias Breem, in Washington. In order to try us in Washington as a group, it was necessary to establish that a crime had been committed in the District of Columbia, thus giving jurisdiction to the federal courts there. So the grand jury, which was obviously controlled by the prosecutor, charged us with the crime of sedition, and then established District of Columbia jurisdiction to try us on the grounds that a District of Columbia resident, "Jefferson Breem," had received the allegedly seditious literature. Thus was the alleged "crime" committed in the capital. The defendants were charged with having conspired in the District of Columbia, despite the fact that I had never been in Washington in my life until ordered there by the grand jury. Even then I was not allowed to have legal counsel.

After the grand jury hearing I returned to California and tried to rebuild my small outdoor advertising business, which the adverse publicity had almost ruined. Even my neighbors were suspicious of me. After the war a railroad union official told me that some union members had talked about tarring and feathering me. They were dissuaded when he told them, "I've known Dave Baxer for years. Let him have a fair trial and if he's guilty, I myself will apply the tar." As it was, two gunmen sneaked up to our house one night and tried to bushwhack me. It was only when I suddenly leaped out on to the front porch with a .38 caliber pistol in my hand that they fled. My wife remembers that incident very well. She jumped under the bed.

This may be hard to believe, but the fact is that although I had come to believe firmly that an international conspiracy of Jewish Sanhedrin-bankers existed and influenced the President and government, I had never heard of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. I had never had the slightest animosity against anyone because of race or creed. I had many Jewish personal friends, whom I was convinced had no knowledge of an international Sanhedrin. Or at least they were my friends until I was smeared as "anti-Semitic." I first heard of the Anti-Defamation League when a cousin of my wife's, who worked in the office of a lawyer named Julius Novak in San Bernardino, one day came to our home greatly agitated. I had never had anything against Novak, but our cousin said that she was in an adjoining room when a delegation she called the "Anti-Defamation League" conferred with Novak and she overheard him say, "We'll get Dave Baxter if it's the last thing we ever do." A few days later my close friend, the San Bernardino postmaster, quietly leaked to me that an Anti-Defamation League group had called on him and asked him to inspect my mail. I then began to suspect who was behind most of my troubles and started researching this organization.

Actually, the Anti-Defamation League was the catalyst behind the entire Sedition Trial. I couldn't prove it then but I can now. A few years ago I demanded, through the Freedom of Information Act, that the FBI turn over to me its investigation records of my activities during the early 1940s leading up to the Sedition Trial. I learned that the investigation had extended over several years and covered hundreds of pages, which I now have. The FBI blocked out the names of those who had given information about me, much of it as false as anything could be. I was never given a chance to face these people and make them prove their accusations. Yet everything they said went into the investigation records. Oddly enough, in a great many cases, it wasn't the FBI that conducted the investigation but the Anti-Defamation League, with the FBI merely receiving the reports of ADL investigators. One can hardly tell from the reports whether a given person was an FBI or an ADL agent. But at the time all this was so hush-hush that I didn't even suspect the web-spinning going on around me. I hadn't considered myself that important. Anyone who wishes to inspect my FBI file is welcome to do so. It's a masterpiece of intrigue, cunning and deception.

One day my wife, Bernice, our two youngsters and I were on a fishing trip in Newport Beach. A U.S. marshal came out from behind our rented cottage, arrested me and, without any explanation, whisked me off to the Los Angeles County jail. Three days later, FBI agents whom I knew well visited me there. They said that there had been a statewide manhunt for me and that I had been indicted along with 29 others before U.S. Commissioner David B. Head during which the charge against me was read. The federal prosecutor was Leo Silverstein, a character who looked like a recycled transsexual. Two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys, A.L. Wirin and Fred Okrand, visited me in jail. For some reason the ACLU had decided to defend me. Its paper announced that while it was unusual for the ACLU to defend "rightists," my case was a clear violation of civil liberties. So I did not obtain a private lawyer. My bail was originally so high that I couldn't make it, but even when it was reduced I still refused to post bond on general principles and spent several months in jail while legal proceedings dragged on. The Justice Department had so far failed to extradite me to Washington. I finally agreed to go voluntarily, believing that since I wasn't guilty of anything, a jury would certainly acquit me. Talk about naivete! A lawyer warned me: "If they get you back there they'll railroad you for sure." But I still had abiding belief in impartial American justice and bullheadedly insisted in going to Washington for trial. Federal Judge Ralph Jenny finally ordered me released on my own recognizance and I returned home to San Bernardino to prepare for the trip to Washington. I was almost broke by then, so I asked the government to pay my railroad fare. Accordingly, I was told to report to the U.S. Marshall in Los Angeles for transportation, which I did. Two marshals reserved a drawing room on the Sante Fe railroad and accompanied me. We became quite friendly and called each other by our first names, but as we boarded the train one of the marshals shame-facedly showed me a telegram he had received from Washington which ordered: "Bring the prisoner back in chains and handcuffs." The marshall said,"Forget it, Dave. You're no dangerous criminal." "Right," I replied, "but you aren't going to lose your job for refusing to obey orders. You're going to do as ordered." So that was that. I never missed an opportunity, when passing through a crowd in a railroad station, to call out, "I'm a guest of your President, who is also your enemy, as you will someday find out."

An interesting sidelight at this time was when my dearly beloved wife tried to find employment to support herself and the children after I was jailed. She was from an old San Bernardino County pioneer family and well thought of. She had worked in the court house before marrying me. She was hired at the San Bernardino Air Depot and was praised for her efficiency. But shortly thereafter, Col. Adrian Cote, who commanded the depot, learned who she was and dismissed her on the ground that she was the wife of David Baxter. He then told her in a letter, which I still have, that if she wished to divorce me she could have her job back. When she refused he wrote another letter telling her that she was discharged with prejudice so that she could not get another job. All that happened before I had been tried or been convicted of anything. (As it turned out, I never was convicted of anything.) Yet even the school kids taunted our youngsters, "You're daddy's in jail."

After my arrival in Washington I was not permitted freedom on my own word, as I had been in Los Angeles, so that I couldn't find a job to support my wife and kids. I was hustled off to the District jail without counsel or the opportunity to obtain a lawyer. The jail admission officer was a big, sloppy-appearing guy who, after asking my name, said to me, "What's your address? Where do you want your body shipped?" Sedition defendants in the jail nicknamed him "Anus" (Annas was a high priest at Jesus' trial.) He was an ornery rascal who liked to gloatingly mention the execution chamber in the facility.

My cell was cold. My hearing was already bad and it became worse, with earaches and no medical attention. The food was terrible, consisting mostly of plain bread and heavily-peppered soup, with one cup of weak coffee. When fellow defendant Leon de Aryan once looked out the barred window of the window of the dining room and remarked, "It looks like rain," I glanced at my cup and replied, "Yeah, but it smells a little like coffee." We were finally allowed a dish of chocolate pudding as a special diet. The U.S. Marshal's bullpen in the District Court House basement was even worse. Defendants George Viereck, Ralph Townsend, Bill Lyman, Edward James Smythe and I were thrown into one large room with a galaxy of criminals and suspects of all kinds. The single toilet without a lid was covered with excrement and cigarette butts, and a leaky old faucet was our only drinking supply. Our "dinner" consisted of one piece of bread, one slice of baloney, and coffee. Talk about punishment before trial -- and in our own American capital!

Bill Lyman was in England when the indictment was issued. Instead of fleeing, he immediately booked passage home and surrendered himself to the authorities. But rather than allowing him freedom to earn a living while awaiting trial, he was handcuffed and put in leg irons in the District jail. After several months in jail, Howard S. Le Roy learned that I was there and called on me. At first he was frankly skeptical of my description of jail conditions, but after investigating on his own he said that he had never known anything like it. Political prisoners were usually treated more leniently and, if wealthy, were generally put under mere "house arrest." Thanks to an old friend, Henry G. Reinsch of Tacoma, Washington, who had never disowned me despite extreme pressure, I was released on $1,000 bond. I still didn't like the bond idea, but it was better than spending a lifetime in jail without trial.

Now this may seem absurd, but to this day I am thankful that my enemies were successful in their persecution. The reason is that while in the Washington jail I became a convert to Jesus Christ. You can bet your bottom dollar that wasn't in the enemy's plans. Yet, thank God, they were actually instrumental in bringing about that very thing. For years I had been a confirmed agnostic, although my wife was a Christian. It was while reading a Gideon Bible left in my cell that this miraculous event occurred. As I was making notes on alleged biblical contradictions, expecting to someday write an article about this, I found myself more and more drawn to Christ. What He said and His apostles wrote made more sense than I had ever imagined. He had the same enemies I had, but He certainly suffered infinitely more than I ever did. What's more, I had to admit that I was a sinner and needed spiritual salvation, which Jesus alone of all the prophets that ever lived provided. The shedding of His blood now really meant something to me. Whatever happened to my mortal body, His enemies and mine would never be able to conquer my soul. I was so happy about my salvation that it wasn't long before we even had a sizable Bible class among the prisoners during the occasional recreation periods. A Washington missionary named Harvey Prentice, in charge of the Gospel Mission, was a big help during this period, bless his soul. So I returned to California a Christian, much to the joy of Bernice and the kids, who ran out to meet me on the porch late one night upon my arrival home.

In the meantime the federal courts in Washington threw out the indictment and I wound up on Los Angeles's Skid Row trying in vain to find a job. Every prospective employer was warned against hiring me. Nevertheless, back in San Bernardino I started painting signs for people, was welcomed by city officials who by now had their own ideas about the cause of my trouble, spoke in churches, and soon ran a thriving sign shop. The enemy arranged for another indictment in 1943 but the courts scuttled it. Despite that, a third indictment was issued after Roosevelt appointed a New York lawyer named O. John Rogge to the Justice Department as an assistant attorney general specially in charge of the Sedition Case. Roosevelt also appointed a former Iowa Congressman, Edward C. Eicher, as Chief Justice of the federal court in Washington with direct orders to try the Sedition Case. Rogge was a protégé of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had planted his "hot dog boys" in sensitive government positions.

Columnist Drew Pearson testified that Attorney General Francis Biddle had advised against the whole Mass Sedition venture from the beginning, but Roosevelt ordered him to proceed anyway, adding, "I will appoint the judge." With Eicher now in place as Chief Justice of the U.S. District Court, the trial began on 17 April 1944 with Eicher presiding. There were some 30 defendants, including some of those originally indicted. I well remember Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling, Joseph Dilling, Joseph McWilliams, Lawrence Dennis, Robert Edmondson, Col. Eugene Sanctuary, Robert Noble, Ellis Jones, German-American Bunders Herman Schwinn and Hans Diebel, Garland Alderman, Prescott Dennett, Lois de Lafayette Washburn, August Klapprott, Elmer J. Garner, George Deathage, William Dudley Pelley, James True, and others. My name had appeared on all three indictments, so it seemed that someone had a special interest in wanting to railroad me into prison. Even though several of the German-American Bundists had already been convicted in other trials, they were added to our group in an effort to collectively discredit all the defendants as alien and "un-American." Actually, those who arranged our trial did not consider us the ultimate targets. Our trial was meant to intimidate others and set an important precedent. After disposing of us the people behind the venture planned to put the leading opponents of Roosevelt's war policy on trial, including American First Committee spokesman Charles A. Lindbergh, General Robert Wood of Sears Roebuck, several senators and congressmen, and possibly Father Charles E. Coughlin and Henry Ford. Our trial was intended to be a "warm up" for trials of really prominent Americans who dared oppose Roosevelt's policies.

Charles Lindberg at America First Committee Rally

Click on picture to go to outside link about Charles Lindberg

As one paper wrote, "all hell broke loose" when the trial opened. It was covered in every American daily newspaper. Along with the Communist sheets, Marshall Field's leftist New York paper PM bombarded us on page one day after day. The liberal press was somewhat more restrained, including the Washington Post, which had helped to instigate the case. For some reason, though, their former star reporter, Dillard Stokes, alias "Jefferson Breem," was missing from the courtroom. Most conservative papers assumed a wait-and-see attitude, although the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News forthrightly opposed the Justice Department and gave decent, unbiased coverage of the defendants. A United Press report published in those papers in 1943 even went so far as to state:

Under pressure from Jewish organizations, to judge from articles appearing in publications put out by Jews for Jews, the new indictment even more than the first was drawn to include criticisms of Jews as "sedition." It appeared that a main purpose of the whole procedure, along with outlawing unfavorable comments on the administration, was to set a legal precedent of judicial interpretations and severe penalties which would serve to exempt Jews in America from all public mention except praise, in contrast to the traditional American viewpoint which holds that all who take part in public affairs must be ready to accept full free public discussion, either pro or con.

I took Bernice and our children with me on this trip to Washington. After prosecutor Rogge tried unsuccessfully to revoke my bond, we found what passed for an apartment in a tenement. Because I was short of funds, I had a court-appointed lawyer, Hobart Little, who was a fraternity brother of Chief Justice Eicher. During the trial Hobart roomed with Joseph McWilliams' lawyer, Maximilian St. George, and after he learned the whole story about the case he took a really active interest in defending me. That happened in the case of other defendants as well, much to the consternation of the judge and prosecutor, who had obviously intended to make short work of the Sedition Trial. Far from letting their clients be sacrificed, court-appointed lawyers like James McLaughlin stormed into court and in just a few days had the proceedings in an uproar. Mr. Little and I, however, remained calm and were careful to show respect for an American court -- even this one. The trial got almost completely out of hand and Eicher spent a lot of time banging his gavel. After at least a dozen attorneys were found in contempt, they came into court wearing buttons bearing the insignia "E.C.C." When the judge asked about the buttons, McLaughlin informed him that the initials stood for "Eicher Contempt Club." The attorneys eventually named Eicher a defendant in a suit they brought during the trial accusing him of holding office illegally. He was not a resident of the District of Columbia, as the law required. The judge once had to recess the trial to defend himself against our lawyers in another court. As I recall, his case had still not been settled when he died.

The trial caused such a scandal that even the staid District Bar Association found itself in an uproar about it. Lawyers not connected with the Sedition Trial demanded an investigation and called the case a "judicial farce." The Bar Association finally appointed a committee of observers to sit in on the trial. A good example of the trial's legal high jinks occurred when our little boy, David, came down sick and his doctor reported that he suspected diptheria. After spending several hours with David, I returned to the courtroom. Attorney McLaughlin then immediately jumped up and said to the judge, "I move that the defendant Baxter be seated next to Prosecutor Rogge." That made Rogge furious, but the unrelenting pressure on him from some 30 lawyers kept him angry most of the time anyway. He was losing his case and knew it. Even the jury sometimes laughed when a defense lawyer needled the prosecutor. Rogge spent much of his time reading from literature written by the defendants. I could see from the jurors' faces that they were more bored than impressed, waiting for him to present some direct evidence that the accused were actually guilty of the charges he accused them of. He never did that. Indeed, the thing became so loose that before long I was even on friendly terms with the male jurors I often met in the restroom, although we didn't discuss the trial. After about a month, when Bernice and I entered the cafeteria, some of the jurors who were having lunch called out, "Hey Dave, you and your wife bring your trays over and eat with us." If they had voted, I doubt that a single one of them would have convicted me.

Washington's a broiler in the summer. Our tenement was as hot as a furnace, and Bernice and the kids really suffered. I found a job working evenings after court sessions doing art work and lettering, but it only lasted a couple of months. As usual, someone called on the boss and told him who I was. We received a little income from my California business but the fellow I had left in charge was a poor manager and even that source finally trickled out. The defense lawyers were unpaid but they managed to collect a few small donations now and then which they shared with us. Mrs. Dilling, Dr. Winrod and a few other co-defendants were more affluent and they collected about $100 each from their followers for our family and others. I've never forgotten those two $100 gifts.

Fellow defendant Elmer J. "Pop" Garner was 82 years old and very deaf. He had headlined me in his little Kansas paper, Publicity. Garner could barely afford a cheap boarding room and during the noon recess all he could afford for lunch was a doughnut and cup of coffee. I wasn't in much better shape, but "Pop" and I stuck it out and even joked during our talks. "Pop" Garner was an old Kansas pioneer and one of the finest men I've ever known. He couldn't hear a word of his trial and died after a few months. Prosecutor Rogge had his body sent back to his widow stark naked in a plain pine box. That really enraged not only the defendants but even several newspapers and many people with common decency. After his death, whenever Rogge mentioned old "Pop" before the jury he referred to him as "the conspirator Garner." He never prefixed the term "conspirator" to any of us still living, for we were there with our lawyers. At least "Pop" Garner no longer had to endure the trial or the Washington heat.

One torrid day I came home from court and said to Bernice and our youngsters, "Let's get out of here for a while, board a streetcar and go somewhere, anywhere, to cool off." So we boarded the first trolley that came along, marked "Cabin John." We didn't know where Cabin John was, or care, just so we could sit in the breeze as the car rolled along. The streetcar eventually left the city itself and followed the track through beautiful, cool woods along the Potomac River. Bernice had an inspiration and suggested that we get off at a stop and walk along the river bank. We hiked along, admiring the woods and river, when we came to an abandoned cruiser high up on the bank. It was a really nice little ship and equipped for living. Even the engine was still in place. We played Robinson Crusoe on it for a while and then continued our walk, coming to a fishing camp a short distance away. We talked with the owner of the camp, a man named Crampton. When we mentioned the boat, he said that it had belonged to a Swedish mariner who had moored it to the river bank, left and never returned. A flood had left it high and dry, and it was now in receivership. Thinking that we might manage a small down payment on the boat or rent it for the duration of the trial, we had Crampton call up the receiver, who lived across the river. A short time later he came over in a boat.

As it turned out, the receiver was anxious to settle the estate and, after some haggling, told us we could have the cruiser for less than $200 cash. That was most of the money we had left, but to this day I've never heard of such a bargain. We bought it on the spot. Crampton and some other men brought over some equipment and got the boat into the water. It was in perfect condition and so, a few days later, we left the tenement apartment and moved aboard our new home. During the remaining months of the trial we lived in cool comfort on the river under a big shade tree that hung out over the water. The kids went back and forth on a gangplank and played in the woods. The fishing was excellent. I rode to court each morning on the street car. Of course, the other defendants and their lawyers were always welcome aboard when they could visit us and we were glad to be able to show them a good time. It was at least a diversion from the bad time the Justice Department was giving us in court.

After the first few months of excitement, the trial settled down to a humdrum presentation of the government's case, which consisted of a perpetual reading aloud of defendant literature by Rogge. The jurors were getting fidgety and finally asked how long the case would last. They had had to neglect their business and family affairs and were obviously bored stiff. On one occasion, while Rogge was heatedly denouncing a defendant as an "anti-Semite," one of them glanced at me and yawned. Later, in the wash room, he didn't say a word to me, but shook his head, gave me a slight smile, and managed a little wink. I don't think that Justice Eicher ever realized what he was getting into when Roosevelt decided to use him. Eicher was a professing Christian -- an Iowa Mennonite -- and the case was obviously getting on his nerves. He became more testy as the trial droned on and finally asked Rogge when he was going to start presenting solid evidence. The fact was that Rogge didn't have any, as was later proved. The case might have gone on for years.

Then suddenly one day Judge Eicher asked me to stand up and announced that he was severing me from the case on the ground that I wasn't able to hear my own trial. That was true. My hearing had declined from the time of my imprisonment so that I was now 85 percent deaf. I wore a hearing aid but the devices were far from their present-day level of near-perfection. I couldn't hear a single witness on the stand some fifty feet away and my lawyer had to translate for me. What caused Eicher to make his decision is conjectural. Several times attorney Little had moved for a severance for me because I was deaf, but Eicher had overruled him. And yet, after several months, he ordered me to see a specialist for a hearing examination. After receiving the specialist's report he severed me without even a motion from Mr. Little to do so. Later that day Judge Eicher asked to see me privately in his chamber. When we met he smiled, held out his hand, and said: "Go back to California and forget about it, Dave." Frankly, I was glad to be through with the whole ordeal, as were Bernice and Mr. Little, who were there with me. So I replied, "Well, your honor, forgetting it wo''t be easy, but as a Christian I'm glad to forgive." We immediately sold the cruiser and were preparing to take a train to California when Eicher again asked to talk to me. This time he said that if we wanted to buy an automobile and drive back he would help, and actually handed me a whole roll of gasoline coupons. (During the war every motorist had to have those coupons to buy gasoline, which was severely rationed.) All the same, we returned by train, but back in California we had a car and those coupons certainly came in handy.

Judge Eicher then began severing other defendants, even though Rogge was far from resting his case. The Washington Post (16 July 1944) commented editorially:

The severance of three cases from Washington's mass sedition trial is the best news that has come out of this dreary affair in Justice Eicher's court. It clearly suggests belated recognition of the mistake that was made in bringing 30 individuals of widely varying temperaments and backgrounds to trial at the same time and place for a series of alleged offenses classified as sedition.

One defendant recently died. Another is too ill to attend court sessions regularly. A third found it difficult to follow the proceedings because of limited hearing. A fourth proved to be so obstreperous as seriously to interfere with the progress of the trial. In other words, the exigencies of human life are such as to defeat most any attempt to dispose of complicated criminal charges en masse with both fairness and dispatch. It is a pity that the Department of Justice did not foresee this elementary objection to mass trials before embarking on such an adventure.

The fact that four cases have been eliminated from the trial is overshadowed, therefore, by the larger fact that 26 cases remain before the court. We hope that better progress can be made but no end to even the presentation of evidence by the prosecution is in sight after 13 weeks. How can the jurymen be expected to remember testimony given many weeks before their verdict will be rendered? How can they, in these circumstances, distinguish the varying degrees of guilt, if any, among the 26 remaining defendants? We fear that whatever may be the outcome of this trial it will stand as a black mark against American justice for many years to come.

Such were the remarkable words of the very paper whose own reporter had plotted with the original prosecutor to entrap the defendants and bring them to trial in Washington. "Oh what tangled webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive." As if to add insult to injury, the Post issued another blistering editorial some two weeks later headed "Courtroom Farce." (28 July 1944}. The lengthy editorial included these remarks:

we think the time has come to recognize the unlikelihood of securing any fair approximation of justice from this unhappy experiment. The end of the Government's testimony is nowhere in sight. Prosecutors have 4000 exhibits to offer in evidence and only about one-eighth of them are in the record at present. At its present rate of progress, therefore, the trial may run on for several years after the war is over. Meanwhile it is gravely undermining confidence in American justice.

The editorial concluded:

After all, this is a trial of men and women accused of sedition, not a contest in befuddlement. In our opinion the trial can continue its present course only at the cost of serious impairment of our judicial system and the reputation of those responsible for this travesty.

Apparently the Post didn't consider itself among those responsible for what it now called "this travesty." In any case, the paper indignantly withdrew its reporter, James Chinn, from the courtroom. Post Managing editor A.F. Jones told a PM reporter: "I'm not going to keep a man tied up on a lot of baloney." Seeing the way the trial was going, it's clear that the Washington Post was now anxious to obscure its own role in bringing it about. The paper was now calling the case a "black mark against American justice for many years to come" and a "travesty."

What remained of the ill-fated Sedition Trial ended abruptly when Justice Eicher died suddenly of a heart attack on 30 November 1944. That trial could have killed any judge with a Christian conscience and any semblance of fairness. I felt genuinely sorry about Justice Eicher's death. Although Rogge was still reluctant to end the business, he now had a new judge to contend with. Justice Bolitha Laws, a veteran federal judge in the District of Columbia, took over and promptly made it clear that he was a no-nonsense jurist who wanted definite and purposeful action. After Roosevelt died suddenly and mysteriously in April 1945, Rogge admitted to Justice Laws that he had a weak case, but with the European part of the war over, he asked for time to visit Germany to interview Nazi officials and get evidence. After all, he had accused the defendants of having conspired with Adolf Hitler and German officials in the indictment. Laws granted Rogge's request for a continuance in order to question former high Nazis in Germany. Several months later Rogge again appeared before his honor. He was empty-handed. None of the Nazi officials had ever heard of me. They knew that one defendant, George Sylvester Viereck, had been a registered American agent for the German government before the war, when such representation was (and is) quite legal. Most foreign governments retain respected Americans who are registered to represent their interests.

Justice Laws repeatedly asked Rogge if he wanted a new trial. When the prosecutor kept hesitating and even expressed doubt about the government's chances of winning, Laws blasted the Justice Department for its "lack of diligence," (in his exact words), and dismissed Rogge for good. The new President, Harry Truman, then fired Rogge. It later turned out that Rogge had been a good friend of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was involved in numerous Communist front groups, and had visited Russia where he spoke in the Kremlin and laid a wreath at the grave of American Communist Party co-founder John Reed in Red Square. His wreath was inscribed, "In loving memory from grateful Americans." Along with movie actor Charlie Chaplin, Rogge was an American delegate to a world Communist "peace conference" in Paris and was a lawyer for many Communists in trouble with the law. He was the attorney for David Greenglass, the atomic spy who saved his own life by turning state's evidence against his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs went to the electric chair for turning over U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets. John Rogge, Roosevelt's choice to prosecute the Sedition Trial and Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter's right-hand man, was thus eventually exposed for what he was. No wonder he was so fanatical in his hatred against the Sedition Trial defendants, all of whom were anti-Communists. After Justice Eicher severed me from the case, Rogge met me in the deserted courtroom and called me a "fascist" to my face. "Fascist" is a favorite term Communists apply to their enemies.

With Rogge out, an assistant attorney general who had helped him named T. Lamar Caudle took over. Probably prompted by the same people who had been behind Rogge, Caudle tried to continue the persecution and appealed Justice Laws' decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals. But that court turned him down, using strong language. Caudle was himself later convicted of "fixing" the income tax of a St. Louis merchant named Wolfe and he received five years in the federal penitentiary.

It should be noted that during those five years and three indictments, the public was continuously propagandized against us in radio broadcasts and best-selling books. I was attacked in at least five books. One was the famous best seller Under Cover by John Roy Carlson. It turned out that "Carlson" was one Avedis Derounian, a writer for the Communist Daily Worker newspaper. Radio propagandist Walter Winchell had collaborated with him on the book and then advertised it over nationwide radio. Derounian, alias "Carlson," was later found guilty of libel in United States District Court in Chicago. Trial judge Barnes commented in sentencing that Derounian would "write anything for a dollar" and that, after hearing the evidence, he would not "believe anything Derounian said under oath." A similar best-selling book of the time, warmly promoted by Winchell, Drew Pearson and then U.S. Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, was Sabotage: The Secret War Against America. The authors were Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, later reported by congressional investigators to be members of the Communist Party. But at the time the public was given to understand that all these propagandists were just good American patriots exposing America's enemies.

Well, five years of this was enough for me. I went to work, paid off all our bills, worked for the Santa Ana (California) Register for a couple of years, wrote a syndicated column, studied theology, and thought I was through with politics. But not the real conspirators who had all but ruined our family life and seen their court case blown to smithereens. A couple of years after the trial, one of the Congressional spokesmen, Adolph Sabath of Illinois, began beating the drum to start a whole new Sedition proceeding and started pressuring the Justice Department.

So now I'll tell you why I'm not made of the stuff of heroes. I gave up. My nerves were half shot from the five-year persecution. At that time a "friend" visited to tell me that if I wished to make my peace with Mr. Sabath and avoid further molestation, I could write Sabath a letter apologizing for my alleged "anti-Semitism" and assuring him that because I had become a Christian and was confining myself to religious affairs, I would not return to political activity. At first I strongly rejected this "offer." Furthermore, I really wasn't anti-Jewish as such, and felt that that point should be clarified. (Of course, the Anti-Defamation League was quite another matter.)

I was concerned about my children and my wife, Bernice, who begged me to ask Sabath's mercy. She pleaded, "Dave, we can't stand any more. We don't want to die. For my sake and our children's, please don't let us go through this again."

I caved in and wrote the required letter to the Congressman. I received a cordial reply. The pressure on the Justice Department stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The incident demonstrated the terrifying power to manipulate the United States government wielded by hidden forces. I was now out of the game, broken and disillusioned. I had given my all to be a solid American but there's a limit to every person's endurance. I recovered enough to become a well-known newspaper editor, theologian and writer for many Christian magazines. And I sometimes became involved in issues requiring that I take a firm stand one way or another. Thank God, I still have some of that spirit at 76 years of age. I have no regrets about the Sedition Trial. Bernice and I celebrated our golden wedding anniversary in 1983. Our children are now middle-aged and successful. We are still firmly dedicated to our Christian faith and American nationalism, with charity toward all and malice toward none.

For the sake of the historical record I would still like to see the U.S. Congress acknowledge that an injustice was done against 30 American citizens in the Sedition Case. Not one of us ever received a penny in compensation for our mistreatment and expenses, much less any official acknowledgment that our government made a serious mistake. Only Congressional committees have made such admissions. Yes, I would like to see our Congress vindicate itself before history by at least partially erasing what the Washington Post called "a black mark against American justice" and the federal courts declared "a travesty upon justice." I believe that God will one day bring this about

Reproduced from:

The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)

Judges and lawyers alike will tell you the mass sedition trial of World War II will go down in legal history as one of
 the blackest marks on the record of American jurisprudence. In the legal world, none can recall a case where so many Americans were brought to trial for political persecution and were so arrogantly denied the rights granted [guaranteed—Ed.] an American citizen under the Constitution.”¹

This is how the Chicago Tribune, then a voice for America First in a media world already brimming with internationalism, described the infamous war time “show trial” and its aftermath.

“The Great Sedition Trial” formally came to an unexpected halt on November 30, 1944, having been declared a mistrial upon the death of the presiding judge. Yet, the case continued to hang in limbo with Justice Department prosecutors angling for a retrial.

However, on November 22, 1946, Judge Bolitha Laws of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, dismissed the charges against the defendants, saying that to allow the case to continue would be “a travesty on justice.”²

Although the Justice Department prosecutors appealed the dismissal, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld Judge Laws’ ruling and, as a consequence, the saga of the Great Sedition Trial at long last came to a close. This brought to an end five years of harassment that the defendants had suffered, including—for some—periods of imprisonment.

Judge Laws had thus called a halt to this Soviet-style attack on American liberty. Sanity had prevailed and the case was shelved forever. The war was over and the one individual who was the prime mover behind the trial—Franklin D. Roosevelt—was dead.

According to historian Ronald Radosh, a self-styled “progressive” who has written somewhat sympathetically of the pre-World War II critics of the Roosevelt administration, “FDR had prodded Attorney General Francis Biddle for months, asking him when he would indict the seditionists.”³ Biddle himself later pointed out that FDR “was not much interested . . . in the constitutional right to criticize the government in wartime.”⁴

However, as we shall see, there were powerful forces at work behind the scenes prodding FDR. And they, more than FDR, played a major role in pushing the actual investigation Biddle was not enthusiastic to undertake.

Although there was a grand total of 42 people (and one newspaper) indicted—over the course of three separate indictments, beginning with the first indictment, which was handed down on July 21, 1942, the number of those who actually went on trial was 30, and several of them were severed from the trial as it proceeded.

Roosevelt’s biographer, James McGregor Burns, waggishly called the trial “a grand rally of all the fanatic Roosevelt haters.”⁵ But there’s much more to the story than that.

In fact, there were a handful of influential figures among the indictees. Among them included:

• Noted German-American poet, essayist and social critic, George Sylvester Viereck (a well-known foreign publicist for the German government as far back as World War I);

• Former American diplomat and economist Lawrence Dennis, an informal behind-the-scenes advisor to some of the more prominent congressional critics of the Roosevelt administration;

• Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling of Chicago, an outspoken and highly articulate author and lecturer who was well regarded and widely known nationally as a leader of the anti-communist movement and a fierce opponent of the administration;

• Rev. Gerald Winrod of Kansas. With a national following and wide-ranging connections among Christian ministers and lay leaders throughout the country, Winrod had emerged as a force to be reckoned with. In 1938 he ran a strong race for the U.S. Senate. (One of Winrod’s protégés was none other than evangelist Billy Graham, who is said to have “learned much but kept quiet publicly about what he learned privately”⁶ as a young man traveling with Winrod.) And:

• William Griffin, a New York-based publisher with strong connections in the Roman Catholic Church. Many American Catholics were strongly anti-communist, and Irish-American Catholics, in particular, were generally skeptical of FDR’s war policies at a time when, it will be remembered, the government of Ireland remained neutral in the war being waged against Germany by the United States and England, Ireland’s traditional enemy.

However, most of those who finally went to trial were little known and hardly influential on a national level, other than the few exceptions just noted. Among the defendants were: a sign painter who was 80 percent deaf, a Detroit factory worker, a waiter and a maid.

In short, they were at best “average” Americans, without the means or the opportunity to be able to conduct the kind of seditious and internationally connected conspiracy that the government had charged, nor were they in any position to defend themselves against the unlimited resources of the central government. In many cases, the defendants were paupers, virtually penniless. Many of them were “one-man” publishers, reaching small audiences—hardly a threat to the mighty forces that controlled the New Deal. Several were very elderly. Few of the indictees even knew each other before the trial, despite the fact that the indictments charged them with being part of a grand conspiracy, orchestrated by Adolf Hitler, to undermine the morale of the American military during wartime.

Lawrence Dennis commented later that: “One of the most significant features of the trial was the utter insignificance of the defendants in relation to the great importance which the government sought to give to the trial by all sorts of publicity-seeking devices.”⁷

Unfortunately, in this brief study of the tangled circumstances surrounding the great sedition trial, we will be unable to provide all of the defendants the recognition they deserve. But by virtue of having been targeted for destruction by the Roosevelt administration and its behind-the-scenes allies for their patriotic anti-war stand, this handful of otherwise insignificant Americans became folk heroes.

Thanks to their more vocal compatriots, such as, perhaps most notably, Lawrence Dennis, we are able to commemorate the details of their plight today.

According to Dennis, it was the design of the sedition trial to target not the big-name critics of the Roosevelt war policies, but instead to use the publicity surrounding the trial to frighten the vast numbers of potential grass-roots critics of the intervention in the Eurasian war into silence, essentially showing them that, they, too, could end up in the dock if they were to dare to speak out as the defendants had in opposition to the administration’s policies.

Wrote Dennis:

The crackpots, so-called, or the agitators, are never intimidated by sedition trials. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

The people who are intimidated by sedition trials are the people who have not enough courage or enough indiscretion ever to say or do anything that would get them involved in a sedition trial. And it is mainly for the purpose of intimidating these more prudent citizens that sedition trials are held . . .

A government seeking to suppress certain dangerous ideas and tendencies and certain types of feared opposition will not, if its leaders are smart, indict men like Col. [Charles] Lindbergh or senators [Burton] Wheeler [D-Mont.], [Robert] Taft [R-Ohio] and Gerald Nye [R-N.D.], who did far more along the line of helping the Nazis by opposing Roosevelt’s foreign policy as charged against the defendants than any of the defendants.

The chances of conviction would be nil, and the cry of persecution would resound throughout the land.

It is the weak, obscure and indiscreet who are singled out by an astute politician for a legalized witch-hunt. The political purpose of intimidating the more cautious and respectable is best served in this country by picking for a trick indictment and a propaganda mass trial the most vulnerable rather than the most dangerous critics; the poorest rather than the richest; the least popular rather than the most popular; the least rather than the most important and influential.

This is the smart way to get at the more influential and the more dangerous. The latter see what is done to the less influential and less important, and they govern themselves accordingly. The chances of convicting the weaker are better than of convicting the stronger . . .”⁸

 One of the defendants—one of the weaker, less influential and less important, insignificant Americans targeted by FDR—was Elmer J. Garner of Wichita, Kansas. This elderly American patriot died three weeks after the trial began.

Sen. William Langer (R-N.D.), an angry critic of the trial, described the victim in a speech on the floor of the Senate. Garner, he said, was:

“A little old gentleman of 83, almost stone deaf, with three great-grandchildren. After he lost the mailing permit for his little weekly paper, he lived with his aged wife through small donations, keeping a goat and a few chickens and raising vegetables on his small home plot.

“Held in the [Washington, D.C.] jail for several weeks, for lack of bond fees, and finally impoverished by three indictments and forced trips and stays in Washington, he died alone in a Washington rooming house early in this trial, with 40 cents in his pocket. His body was shipped naked in a wooden box to his ailing, impoverished widow, his two suits and typewriter being held, so that clothing had to be purchased for his funeral. That is one of the dangerous men about whom we have been hearing so much.”⁹

Eighty-two-year-old Elmer J. Garner of Wichita, Kansas died one week after the sedition trial opened.  With 40 cents in his pocket, the elderly defendant expired over his typewriter, working on his own defense, in a tiny rented room in a "flophouse" in Washington D.C.  Ironically, the elderly defendant was a cousin of former Roosevelt-era Vice President John Nance Garner of Texas.

According to attorney Henry Klein, an American Jew who defied the ADL by boldly serving as defense counsel for another of the defendants, Garner—who was a first cousin of FDR’s first vice president (1933-1941), John Nance Garner—died at his typewriter in a tiny room in a Washington flophouse, typing out his defense.¹⁰

Who was it, then, that brought about the series of events that led to the indictment of Elmer Garner and his both more distinguished and perhaps even less distinguished fellow “seditionists”?

It was, of course, Franklin D. Roosevelt who ordered the Justice Department investigation. Attorney General Francis Biddle (who opposed this blatantly political prosecution), followed the president’s orders. And Assistant Attorney General William Power Maloney handled the day-to-day details of the investigation that won the indictments before a federal grand jury in Washington. But behind the scenes there were other forces at work: the power brokers who dictated the overall grand design of the Roosevelt administration and its foreign and domestic policies.

In A Trial on Trial, his sharply written critique of the trial, which is a veritable dissection of the fraud that the trial represented, Lawrence Dennis and his co-author, Maximilian St. George (who was Dennis’ counsel during the trial, although Dennis—not an attorney—did most of the legal work himself), concluded—based upon very readily available evidence in the public record—that the three prime movers behind the trial were—in his words—extreme leftists, organized Jewish groups, and internationalists in general, all of whom were loud and persistent advocates of the trial, editorializing in favor of the investigation and indictments in their newspapers and through media voices such as radio personality Walter Winchell.

However, Dennis pointed out, “the internationalists behind the trial are not as easy to link with definite agitation for this prosecution as are the leftists and the Jewish groups.”¹¹ Dennis stated unequivocally: “One of the most important Jewish organizations behind the sedition trial was the B’nai B’rith [referring, specifically, to the B’nai B’rith adjunct known as the Anti-Defamation League or ADL].”¹²

According to Dennis: “Getting the federal government to stage such a trial, like getting America into the war, was a ‘must’ on the agenda of the fighters against isolationism and anti-Semitism.¹³

“What the people behind the trial wanted to have judicially certified to the world was that anti-Semitism is a Nazi idea and that anyone holding this idea is a Nazi, who is thereby violating the law—in this instance, by causing insubordination in the armed forces—through his belief in or advocacy of this idea.”¹⁴

This was not just Dennis’s conclusion, by any means. One of the other defendants, David Baxter, later pointed out that a United Press report published in 1943 said:

Under pressure from Jewish organizations, to judge from articles appearing in publications put out by Jews for Jews, the [indictment] . . . was drawn to include criticisms of Jews as “sedition.”

It appeared that a main purpose of the whole procedure, along with outlawing unfavorable comments on the administration, was to set a legal precedent of judicial interpretations and severe penalties which would serve to exempt Jews in America from all public mention except praise, in contrast to the traditional American viewpoint which holds that all who take part in public affairs must be ready to accept full free public discussion, either pro or con.¹⁵

  “In a word,” commented Dennis, “the sedition trial as politics was smart. It was good politics.”¹⁶

Baxter himself determined in later years that certain Jewish groups, specifically the ADL, had been prime movers behind the Justice Department investigation that resulted in the indictments of the defendants in the sedition trial. According to Baxter, commenting many years later:

I demanded, through the Freedom of Information Act, that the FBI turn over to me its investigation records of my activities during the early 1940s leading up to the Sedition Trial. I learned that the investigation had extended over several years and covered hundreds of pages . . . The FBI blocked out the names of those who had given information about me, much of it as false as anything could be. I was never given a chance to face these people and make them prove their accusations. Yet everything they said went into the investigation records.

Oddly enough, in a great many cases, it wasn’t the FBI that conducted the investigation, but the Anti-Defamation League, with the FBI merely receiving the reports of the ADL investigators. One can hardly tell from the reports whether a given person was an FBI or an ADL agent. But at the time all this was so hush-hush that I didn’t even suspect the web-spinning going on around me. I hadn’t considered myself that important.¹⁷

For his own part, commenting on the way that the FBI had been used by the ADL, for example, Lawrence Dennis pointed out: “The FBI, like the atomic bomb and so many other useful and dangerous tools, is an instrument around the use of which new safeguards against abuse by unscrupulous interests must soon be created.”¹⁸

[To our shame, Americans did not learn that lesson, in light of FBI intrigue alongside the ADL, later exposed in the course of such controversies as the holocaust at Waco, the slaughter of the Weaver family members at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and the mysterious Oklahoma City bombing.—Ed.]

Writing in his 1999 book, Montana’s Lost Cause (see review on page 27), a study of Sen. Burton Wheeler and other members of Montana’s congressional delegation who opposed the Roosevelt administration’s war in Europe, historian Roger Roots also points out another fascinating cog in the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that led to the sedition trial:

The Jewish-owned Washington Post assisted in the detective work of the Justice Department from the beginning. Dillard Stokes, the [Post] columnist who was most conspicuous in his insider reporting of the sedition grand jury proceedings, actually became part of the Justice Department’s case against the isolationists when he wrote requests to numerous of the defendants to send their literature to him under an assumed name. It was this that allowed defendants to be brought from the farthest reaches of the country into the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C.¹⁹

David Baxter elaborated on the role played by the Post columnist Stokes, who used the pseudonym “Jefferson Breem,” in order to obtain some of the allegedly seditious literature that had been published by some of the defendants:

In order to try us in Washington as a group, it was necessary to establish that a crime had been committed in the District of Columbia, thus giving jurisdiction to the federal courts there. So the grand jury, which was obviously controlled by the prosecutor, charged us with the crime of sedition, and then established District of Columbia jurisdiction to try us on the grounds that a District of Columbia resident, “Jefferson Breem,” had received the allegedly seditious literature. Thus was the alleged “crime” committed in the capital. The defendants were charged with having conspired in the District of Columbia, despite the fact that I had never been in Washington in my life until ordered there by the grand jury.²⁰

Kirkpatrick Dilling, now an attorney in Chicago but then a young man in uniform and the son of one of the more prominent defendants, Elizabeth Dilling, pointed out in a letter to TBR publisher Willis Carto that: “My mother was indicted with many others, most of whom she had never had any contact with whatsoever. For example, some of such co-indictees were members of the German-American Bund. My mother said they were included to give the case a ‘sauerkraut flavor.’ ”²¹

Later, during the trial itself, the afore mentioned Sen. Langer, scored what he described as: “the idea of bringing together for one trial in Washington 30 people who never saw each other, who never wrote to each other, some of whom did not know that the others existed, with some of them allegedly insane and the majority of them unable to hire a lawyer.

“And remember,” Langer pointed out, “[the defendants] were brought to Washington from California and [Illinois] and other states a long way from Washington, placed in one room and all tried at the same time, with the 29 sitting idly by while the testimony against one of them may go on for weeks and weeks and weeks, the testimony of a man or woman [whom the] other defendants never saw before in their lives. That is what is taking place in Washington [the District of Columbia] here today.”²²

As mentioned previously, there were actually three indictments handed down. The first indictment came on July 21, 1942. The indictments came as a surprise to more than a few people, including the defendants. As David Baxter said: “Actually, at that time I was simply a New Deal Democrat interested in what was going on in the country politically.”²³ But as a consequence of the indictment, he was being accused of sedition by the very regime he had once supported.

Elizabeth Dilling learned of her indictment on the radio. The nature of one of the charges against Mrs. Dilling exposes precisely how trumped up the sedition trial was from the start. The indictment charged that Mrs. Dilling had committed “sedition” by reprinting, in the pages of her newsletter, a speech in Congress by Rep. Clare Hoffman (R-Mich.), an administration critic, in which the congressman quoted an American soldier in the Philippines who complained his outfit lacked bombers because the planes had been given to Britain.²⁴ This ostensibly was dangerous to military morale.

But Mrs. Dilling’s many supporters around the country rose to her defense, raising money through dances, dinners and bake sales. Mrs. Dilling, ever courageous, would not let even a federal criminal indictment silence her. She still continued to speak out.

On August 17, 1942 Sen. Robert A. Taft spoke out against the indictment:²⁵ “I am deeply alarmed by the growing tendency to smear loyal citizens who are critical of the national administration and of the conduct of the war . . .

“Something very close to fanaticism exists in certain circles. I cannot understand it—cannot grasp it. But I am sure of this: Freedom of speech itself is at stake, unless the general methods pursued by the Department of Justice are changed.”²⁶

Taft noted that the indictment, in his words, was “adroitly drawn”²⁷ and said it claimed that groups such as the Coalition of Patriotic Societies were linked to the accused conspirators. The coalition, Taft noted, included among its member organizations such groups as the Descendants of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, the General Society of Mayflower Descendants and the Sons of the American Revolution, among others.

On the basis of the way in which the indictment was written, Taft said, a considerable number of members of both the House and the Senate could also be indicted, along with a considerable number of the nation’s newspaper editors.

The second indictment came on January 4, 1943. Lawrence Dennis summarized the nature of the indictments: “The first indictment charged conspiracy to violate the seditious propaganda sections of both the wartime Espionage Act of 1917 and the peacetime Smith Act of 1940, sometimes called the Alien Registration Act. This indictment . . . was that the defendants had conspired to spread Nazi propaganda for the purpose of violating the just mentioned laws. The government case consisted of showing the similarity between the propaganda themes of the Nazis and the defendants.”²⁸

However, as Dennis pointed out, for a conviction on such an indictment to stand under the law, it is necessary to prove similarity of intent of the persons accused rather than similarity of content of what they said.

“The weaknesses of these first two indictments were that they fitted neither the law nor the evidence. The government’s difficulty was that, to please the people behind the trial, it had had to indict persons whose only crime was isolationism, anti-Semitism and anti-communism when there was no law on the statute books against these ‘isms.’ The two laws chosen for the first two indictments penalized advocacy of the overthrow of the government by force and of insubordination in the armed forces.”²⁹

Several new defendants were added with the second indictment. Among them was Frank Clark. Considering the charge that Clark (and the others) had been conspiring to undermine the morale of the American military, it is worth noting that Clark was “a highly decorated veteran of World War I, who was wounded eight times in action. Clark had been an organizer of the famous Bonus March of World War I veterans to Washington in the 1920s. He had lobbied for early payment of veterans’ bonuses that had been promised to the war’s veterans, returning home a hero. When arrested, he lacked enough money to hire a lawyer.”³⁰

All of this, however, meant nothing in the course of the ongoing effort by the Roosevelt administration to silence its critics and to prevent more and more Americans from speaking out.

Throughout this period, the major media was rife with reports of how a group of Americans, in league with Hitler and the German National Socialists, were trying to destroy America from within and how the Roosevelt administration was bravely taking on this conspiracy. However, the Justice Department had made a misstep and the second indictment, like the first, was thrown out.

As Roger Roots notes, “The indictment was unlawful. It was discarded due to the obvious absence of evidence for conviction, among other flaws. Past Supreme Court decisions clearly showed that a conviction for advocating the overthrow of the government by violent force must include some evidence of actual plans to use violence, not just political literature. Again, the indictment was never dismissed formally but simply retired.”³¹

Sen. Burton Wheeler, in particular, was a harsh critic of the Justice Department and publicly made clear his intention, as new head of the Senate Judiciary Committee following the 1942 elections, to keep a close watch on the affair as it unfolded. As far as the legal procedures used in the first two indictments, he declared: “If it happened in most jurisdictions of this country, the prosecuting attorneys would be held for contempt of court.”³²

Thus, despite all the determined efforts of the Justice Department and its allies in the Anti-Defamation League and at The Washington Post, the first two indictments were indeed thrown out as defective.

On March 5, 1943 Judge Jesse C. Adkins dismissed the count in the indictment that accused the defendants of conspiring together “on or about the first day of January 1933, and continuously thereafter up to and including the date of the filing” of the indictment since, as the judge held, the law which the defendants were accused of conspiring to violate had not been enacted until 1940.³³ At this juncture, under pressure from Sen. Wheeler, Attorney General Biddle agreed to remove prosecutor William Power Maloney as the chief “Nazi-hunter.”

Thus, a new Justice Department prosecutor entered into the case, O. John Rogge. As defendant David Baxter pointed out, Rogge was a fitting choice for the administration’s chief point man in this Soviet-style show trial:

It later turned out that Rogge had been a good friend of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was involved in numerous communist front groups, and had visited Russia, where he spoke in the Kremlin and laid a wreath at the grave of American Communist Party co-founder John Reed in Red Square. His wreath was inscribed: “In loving memory from grateful Americans.” . . . Rogge was an American delegate to a world communist “peace conference” in Paris and was a lawyer for many communists in trouble with the law. He was the attorney for David Greenglass, the atomic spy who saved his own life by turning state’s evidence against his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg [who] went to the electric chair for turning over U.S. atomic secrets to the Soviets. [Rogge] was thus eventually exposed for what he was. No wonder he was so fanatical in his hatred against the Sedition Trial defendants, all of whom were anti-communists.³⁴

Rogge was an ideal choice for the Roosevelt administration and its allies, who were determined to pursue the prosecution, one way or the other. He moved forward relentlessly.

As Roger Roots points out: “Not wishing to waste momentum, the government reconvened another grand jury, resubmitted the same pamphlets, publications, and materials that the previous grand jury had already seen, re-called the same testimony of the witnesses, and once again pleaded the grand jury to return yet another indictment.”³⁵

The third (and final) indictment was handed down on January 3, 1944. In fact, Rogge and his Justice Department allies had decided to take a new tack and added eight new names (including Lawrence Dennis, who had not been named in the first indictments) and dismissed 12 defendants who had been named.

Among those whose names were dismissed were influential New York Catholic lay leader William Griffin and his newspaper, The New York Evening Enquirer (the only publication indicted) former American diplomat Ralph Townsend of San Francisco and Washington, D.C. and Paquita (“Mady”) de Shishmareff, the well-to-do American-born widow of a former Russian czarist military figure.

Townsend, who had enraged the Roosevelt administration by opposing its anti-Japanese policies in the Pacific, had written an explosive book, Ways That Are Dark, highly critical of imperial China.* But although he was now “free,” he and his family had been broken financially by the indictment, and, according to his late wife, Janet, many of their close friends deserted them in this time of crisis.

“It was a very difficult period in our lives,” she later recalled. “But it didn’t prevent Ralph from continuing to speak out.”³⁶ Townsend did continue to speak out, and in later years he became a friend of Willis A. Carto, publisher of The Barnes Review, and, today, portions of Townsend’s personal library are a part of TBR’s archives.

Tony Blizzard, who is now research director for Liberty Lobby, the Washington-based populist institution, was a protégé in the early 1960s of Paquita de Shishmareff (who wrote as L. Fry) and he recently commented on the circumstances surrounding the decision to drop the indictment against her—along with some fascinating, little-known details about this remarkable woman. In Blizzard’s informed estimation:

One of the reasons they dropped the indictment against Mady was precisely because they knew they were dealing with a very sharp lady with a great deal of brain power. A woman of the old school, Mady would never put herself in the forefront, but she knew how to use the strengths of the men around her. She also was a woman of some means—unlike most of the other defendants—and was a formidable opponent.

The government clearly decided that it was in their best interests to dismiss the case against her. There was no way they could ever make “Nazis” out of all of these defendants, whose only real “crime” was exposing Jewish power as long as Mady was on the dock with the rest of them.

The prosecutors knew quite well, although it was not widely known then nor is it widely known today, that it was Mady who had supplied Henry Ford virtually all of the information that Ford had published in his controversial series about Jewish power in The Dearborn Independent. With her wide-ranging, high-level connections, Mady was an encyclopedic storehouse of inside information about the power elite.

The last thing the prosecution wanted was for Mady to take the stand. By releasing her as a defendant, they eliminated, to them, what was a very frightening possibility.³⁷

But there were 30 others who were not so lucky as Paquita de Shishmareff, Ralph Townsend and the others who had been released, and their trial commenced on April 17, 1944 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Kirkpatrick Dilling, son of defendant Elizabeth Dilling, captured the essence of the indictment. According to Dilling, “The indictment was premised on an alleged ‘conspiracy to undermine the morale of the armed forces.’ Thus criticizing President Roosevelt, who was armed forces commander in chief was an alleged overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. Denouncing our ally, communist Soviet Russia, was a further alleged overt act. Opposing communism was an alleged overt act because our enemy Hitler had also opposed communists.”³⁸

Ironically, while his mother was on trial for her alleged participation in this “conspiracy to undermine the morale of the armed forces,” Kirkpatrick Dilling was promoted from corporal to second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.³⁹

Other defendants, including George Sylvester Viereck, George Deather age, Robert Noble and Rev. Gerald Winrod, also had sons in the U.S. Armed Forces during this period.⁴⁰ Viereck’s son died in combat while his father was on trial and in prison (see the memorial poem on these pages).

Presiding as judge at the trial was ex-Iowa Democratic Congressman Edward C. Eicher, a New Deal stalwart who had served a brief period as chairman of FDR’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after being defeated for re-election to Congress. After Eicher’s term at the SEC, FDR then appointed Eicher to the judgeship. And serving as prosecutor was Eicher’s former legal counsel at the SEC, the aforementioned O. John Rogge. ⁴¹

It seemed that the case was “fixed” from top to bottom.

Albert Dilling, the attorney, who represented his wife Elizabeth Dilling, called for a congressional investigation of the trial on the grounds that it was impossible for such a trial to be fair during wartime.⁴² But that was not enough to stop the trial juggernaut.

Although proving “sedition” was the ostensible purpose of the prosecution, Lawrence Dennis reached other conclusions about the actual political basis for the trial: “The trial was conceived and staged as a political instrument of propaganda and intimidation against certain ideas and tendencies which are popularly spoken of as isolationism, anti-communism and anti-Semitism. The biggest single idea of the trial was that of linking Nazism with isolationism, anti-Semitism and anti-communism.”⁴³ However, as Dennis pointed out:

American isolationism was born with George Washington’s Farewell Address, not with anything the Nazis ever penned. As for “anti-Semitism,” it has flourished since the dawn of Jewish history. It is as old and widespread as the Jews . . . As for anti-communism, while it was one of Hitler’s two or three biggest ideas, it is in no way peculiar to Hitler or the Nazis, any more than anti-capitalism is peculiar to the Russian communists.⁴⁴

To add shock value to the indictment, the government—in an accompanying bill of particulars, which was basically a rehash of the history of the Nazi Party in Germany—named German Chancellor Adolf Hitler as a “co-conspirator.”

During the trial, the prosecutor, Rogge, charged that Hitler had picked the defendants to head a Nazi occupation government in the United States once Germany won the war.⁴⁵

What the prosecutor was essentially trying to do, according to Lawrence Dennis, was “to perfect a formula to convict people for doing what was against no law. It boiled down to choosing a crime which the Department of Justice would undertake to prove equaled anti-Semitism, anti-communism and isolationism. The crime chosen was causing insubordination in the armed forces. The law was the Smith Act,”⁴⁶ which had been enacted in 1940.

As Dennis pointed out: “One of the many ironies of the mass sedition trial was that the defendants were charged with conspiring to violate a law aimed at the communists and [of using] a communist tactic—that of trying to undermine the loyalty of the armed forces. What makes this so ironic is the fact that many of the defendants, being fanatical anti-communists, had openly supported the enactment of this law.”⁴⁸

Defendant David Baxter later recalled:

After Hitler and Stalin concluded a treaty, American communists enthusiastically endorsed those of us who opposed getting into the European war between Germany and the British-French alliance. The communists even stomached the Jewish issue that some of us raised, and many Jewish communists, who wanted the United States to join the war against Hitler, left their party. All that changed overnight, however, when war broke out between Germany and Russia. The communists then turned against us with a vengeance and eagerly backed FDR and American participation in the war to save the Soviets.⁴⁸

Lawrence Dennis’s assessment of the government’s case is reminiscent of that of Kirkpatrick Dilling: “The pattern of the prosecution gradually emerged something like this: Our country is at war; Russia is our ally; the Russian government is communist; these defendants fight communism; they are therefore weakening the ties between the two countries; this is interfering with the war efforts; this in turn is injuring the morale of the armed forces. The indictees should therefore be sent to prison.”⁴⁹

Henry H. Klein, an outspoken Jewish anti-communist, was the attorney who represented defendant Eugene Sanctuary, and he took issue with the very constitutionality of the trial.

“This alleged indictment,” thundered Klein in his opening address to the jury, “is under the peace-time statute, not under the wartime act, and the writings and speeches of these defendants were made when this nation was at peace, and under a Constitution which guarantees free press and free speech at all times, including during wartime, until the Constitution is suspended, and it has not yet been suspended. These people believed in the guarantees set forth in the Constitution, and they criticized various acts of the administration.”⁵⁰

About his own client, Klein noted: “He is 73 years old and devoutly religious. He and his wife ran the Presbyterian foreign mission office in New York City for many years, and he has written and published several hundred sacred and patriotic songs.”⁵¹ One of those songs, Klein noted, was Uncle Sam We Are Standing by You and was published in June of 1942, well after the war had begun—hardly the actions of the dangerous seditionist that the prosecution and the sympathetic press painted Sanctuary to be.

As far as Lawrence Dennis’s purported sedition was concerned, “the prosecution had attempted to prove its case exclusively by placing in evidence seven excerpts from his public writings, reprinted in the publication of the German-American Bund rather than as originally published.”⁵² In other words, the “evidence” that Dennis had committed sedition was because he had written something (published and freely available to the public) that was later reprinted by a group sympathetic to Nazi Germany—not that Dennis himself had actively done anything to stir dissension among the American armed forces. According to Dennis:

The government’s prosecution theory said, in effect: “We postulate a world conspiracy, the members of which all conspired to Nazify the entire world by using the unlawful means of undermining the loyalty of the armed forces. We ask the jury to infer the existence of such a conspiracy from such evidence as we shall submit about the Nazis. We shall then ask the jury to infer that the defendants joined this conspiracy from the nature of the things they said and did. We do not need to show that the defendants ever did or said anything that directly constituted the crime of impairing the morale or loyalty of the armed forces. Our thesis is that Nazism was a world movement, which, by definition, was also a conspiracy to undermine the loyalty of the armed forces and that the defendants were members of the Nazi world movement.”⁵³

There was no more reason to bring out in a charge of conspiracy to cause military insubordination the facts that most of the defendants were anti-Semites, isolationists or anti-communists than there would have been in a trial of a group of New York City contractors on a charge of conspiring to defraud the city to bring out the facts that the defendants were all Irish or Jews and had always voted the Democratic ticket.⁵⁴

  Eugene Sanctuary’s attorney, Henry Klein, pulled no punches when he laid out the defense, declaring:

We will prove that this persecution and prosecution was undertaken to cover the crimes of government—remember that.

We will prove that it was undertaken by order of the president, in spite of the opposition of Attorney General Biddle.

We will prove that Mr. Rogge was selected for this job of punishing these defendants because no one else in the Department of Justice felt that he could find sufficient grounds in to spell out a crime against these defendants.

We will prove that the communists control not only our government but our politics, our labor organizations, our agriculture, our mines, our industries, our war plants and our armed encampments.

We will prove that the law under which these defendants are being tried was enacted at the repeated demands of the heads of our armed forces to prevent communists from destroying the morale of our soldiers, sailors, marine and air forces [and that this prosecution] was undertaken to protect communists who were and are guilty of the very crimes charged against these defendants who are utterly innocent and have been made the victims of this law.⁵⁵

Klein minced no words when he told the jury that Jewish organizations were using the trial for their own ends:

We will prove that this persecution was instigated by so-called professional Jews who make a business of preying on other Jews by scaring them into the belief that their lives and their property are in danger through threatened pogroms in the United States [and that] anti-Semitism charged in this so-called indictment, is a racket, that is being run by racketeers for graft purposes.⁵⁶

Klein also forcefully made the allegation that FBI agents had been acting as agents provocateurs, attempting to stir up acts of sedition:

We will show that the most vicious written attack on Jews and on the Roosevelt administration emanated from the office of the FBI by one of its agents, and that the purpose of this attack was to provoke others to do likewise. We will show that this agent also drilled his underlings in New York with broom sticks preparatory to “killing Jews.”⁵⁷

Klein also put forth a rather interesting allegation about the source of certain funds purportedly supplied by Nazi Germany to no less than Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. According to Klein: “We will show that large sums of Hitler money helped finance Mr. Roosevelt’s campaign for re-election in 1936 and that right at this moment, British, American and German capital and industry are cooperating together in South America and other parts of the world.”⁵⁸

What Klein alleged about international collaboration of high-finance capitalism has been part of the lore of the populist right and the populist left for over a century and is a theme that has been analyzed in scores of books, monographs and other literature, but largely ignored in the so-called academic mainstream.

According to Lawrence Reilly’s account of the sedition trial, Klein’s speech was a critical turning point in the defense: “Klein did much in his brief speech to torpedo Rogge’s case by bringing to light the hidden agencies responsible for its existence.”⁵⁹

However, noted Reilly, even many of the daily newspapers which opposed the trial editorially were afraid to discuss this hidden aspect of the case that Klein had dared bring forth in open court. Reilly said that readers were often left “confused”⁶⁰ because the papers never touched on the real factors involved. Some of these “friendly” papers, Reilly noted, insisted on referring to the defendants as “crackpots.”

 But the fact is that, as a direct consequence of his offensive against the ADL and the other Jewish groups that had played a part in orchestrating the trial, Klein was targeted, specifically because he was Jewish, by organized Jewish groups that resented Klein’s defense of the purported “anti-Semites” and “seditionists.”

For his own part, Lawrence Dennis stood up in court to take on his own defense and delivered what even liberal writer Charles Higham was inclined to acknowledge was “a high-powered address”⁶¹ calling Rogge’s outline of the government case, “corny, false, fantastic, untrue, unproveable and unsound [and describing the trial as] a Roosevelt administration fourth-term conspiracy [and] another Dreyfus case [in which the government was] trying to write history in the heat of battle.”⁶² To the loud applause of his fellow defendants, Dennis declared: “Pearl Harbor did not suspend the Bill of Rights.”⁶³

A critical juncture in the case came when one of the defense attorneys, James Laughlin (a public defender representing Ernest Elmhurst) said in open court that it would be impossible for the trial to continue unless the private files of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith could be impounded and introduced as evidence.

It was clear that much of the prosecution was based on the ADL’s “fact finding” and Laughlin concluded that it would be necessary to determine precisely what the ADL had provided the government if the defendants would be able to put on an effective defense.

The judge seemed prepared to ignore Laughlin’s motion, but the clever attorney had already prepared copies of his motion in advance and distributed copies of the motion to the press. As a direct consequence, Washington newspapers reported that the ADL files had been made an issue in the case. As Reilly summarized the situation: “Laughlin had placed the spotlight upon the big secret of the case.”⁶⁴ This, according to Reilly, was “a bomb, which, some have said, had more to do with demoralizing [the prosecution’s] case than any other single [factor].”⁶⁵

At that point, there seemed to be a strange turnabout in the way that the press supporting the trial began looking at the case. Even The Washington Post (which had played a part in orchestrating the trial by lending the services of its reporter, Dillard Stokes, to the joint ADL-FBI investigation) “completely reversed itself,” according to Reilly, “and started demanding that the case be brought to a quick conclusion.”⁶⁶

In short, The Post wanted to keep “the big secret” of the case—behind-the-scenes orchestration of the case by the ADL—under wraps and now seemed to be calling to bring the trial to a rapid conclusion before the truth came out.

The Post even commented editorially that: “We fear that, whatever may be the outcome of this trial, it will stand as a black mark against American justice for many years to come.”⁶⁷ As David Baxter later remarked: “Such were the remarkable words of the very paper whose own reporter had plotted with the original prosecutor to entrap the defendants and bring them to trial in Washington.”⁶⁹

Despite these concerns, Rogge seemed to intensify his efforts. There was clearly a great deal of behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the prosecutor and his backers as to how to deal with the challenge that had been presented. Since the judge never ordered the ADL’s files impounded, Rogge was free to move forward. He was determined to carry the trial through to conclusion, and he had many more witnesses to present.

Author Roger Roots describes the course of events as follows:

Day after day, the trial wore on. Page after page of publications authored by the defendants was introduced into evidence, giving rise [among] all in attendance to the idea that it was their writings which were really on trial. The government announced that it intended to introduce 32,000 exhibits. It became obvious that what the defendants were really being prosecuted for was “Jew-baiting” which gave an indication of one principal source of the prosecution’s support. It became one of the longest and most expensive trials in U.S. history. In essence, the trial was little more than an assault against free speech.⁶⁹

As the trial proceeded, outspoken trial critic Sen. William Langer visited defendants in jail and defied the media and its allies in the prosecution by publicly escorting defendant Elizabeth Dilling in and out of court and around Washington while she was on bail.⁷⁰

Said Roots: “The government worked with unlimited funds, unlimited personnel, and unlimited access to intelligence information. The defense had to work with mostly court-appointed lawyers who were unacquainted with the defendants and the arguments of the case.”⁷¹

What is particularly interesting, as pointed out by liberal historian Glenn Jeansonne, is that: “Many of the defense attorneys were liberals unsympathetic with the clients’ beliefs. But they came to see the defendants’ side on a human basis, and instead of conducting a perfunctory defense, as many observers had expected, they put up a vigorous defense.”⁷²

Even Charles Higham, who, writing retrospectively, was an enthusiastic advocate of the trial, pointed out that “after two and a half months, neither defendants nor prosecution had managed to present a satisfactory case,”⁷³ and, ultimately, “both press and public were beginning to lose interest in the case.”⁷⁴

At the same time, according to Paquita de Shishmareff, the defendants had managed to survive and develop their own way of dealing with their predicament: “Their physical lives were made almost impossible. They got little to eat and were hamstrung in every way possible. But when they got into court, it was such a farce they really just enjoyed themselves.”⁷⁵

At one point, when the prosecutor was solemnly reading off a list of names of individuals—allies of the Roosevelt administration who had been attacked in some way by the defendants—defendant Edward James Smythe shouted out, “and Eleanor Roosevelt,” resulting in laughter from the courtroom.⁷⁶ Smythe didn’t want Mrs. Roosevelt’s name to go unrecorded in the pantheon of villainy.

This, by the way, was only one of many amusing events that took place during this circus. In many respects, the sedition trial could be the basis for a Hollywood comedy, the serious and scandalous violation of the rights of the defendants notwithstanding.

But this is not to suggest that the sedition trial was all a lot of merriment for the attorneys or for the defendants. Far from it. Two of the attorneys had a shot fired at them as they drove in their car. One of those attorneys lost a 12-year law association. Another was beaten by five thugs and hospitalized for five days.

Henry Klein was harassed relentlessly, held in contempt of court for his defense of his client, and, then, ultimately, driven from the case altogether (although the contempt of court charges were eventually overturned).

In addition, strenuous efforts were made to keep the defendants who were out on bail from holding jobs during the course of the trial, a particular problem for those who were not of independent means (and that was most of them).

One defendant, Ernest Elmhurst, got a job as a headwaiter in a Washington hotel in order to make ends meet during the trial, but the ADL’s leading broadcasting voice, Walter Winchell, learned of Elmhurst’s employment and agitated on his widely heard radio show for Elmhurst’s firing, resulting in Elmhurst’s dismissal.⁷⁷

As the trial dragged on, however, the government began to realize that its efforts were going nowhere. Roger Roots points out: “The prosecution had undoubtedly expected one or more of the defendants to break and testify against the others . . . [Yet] not one defendant gave any indication of such an inclination. Though they disagreed and some even disliked each other, they came together as a cohesive unit.”⁷⁸

David Baxter had the pleasure to learn that he was going to be severed from the trial and the charges dismissed. His increasing deafness made it impossible for Baxter to have a fair trial. Baxter recalls that Judge Eicher called Baxter into his chamber, smiled, held out his hand, and said: “Go back to California and forget about it, Dave.”⁷⁹

The judge reportedly told Baxter that if Baxter and his wife wanted to buy a car to return to California, he would help and handed Baxter a roll of gasoline coupons (which, during wartime, were severely rationed). Despite everything, it seems, even the judge realized what a farce the trial really was.

It was something totally unexpected that brought the trial to a halt: Judge Eicher’s sudden death on November 29, 1944. The judge’s demise came at a point where Rogge was not even halfway through the prosecution’s case. At this point he had brought 39 witnesses to the stand, and expected to present 67 more. The defense had not even yet begun.⁸⁰

Defendant David Baxter later commented (reflecting on his own friendly personal experience with the judge): “That trial could have killed any judge with a Christian conscience and any semblance of fairness. I felt genuinely sorry about Judge Eicher’s death.”⁸¹ Rogge accused the defense of having effectively killed the judge by having put up such a defense that it made the judge’s life (and that of the prosecutor) uncomfortable. Under the circumstances, it was apparent that there was no way that the case could continue on a fair basis.

As a consequence, after a period of legal haggling on both sides (with one defendant, Prescott Dennett, actually asking for the trial to continue, determined to present his defense after having been tried and convicted in the media), a mistrial was declared.

Prodded primarily by Jewish groups, Prosecutor Rogge hoped to be able to keep the case alive and set a new trial in motion. But by the spring of 1945, the trial’s chief instigator, President Roosevelt, was dead, and the war had come to a close. Rogge, however, continued to ask for delays in setting a new trial date. Since Germany had fallen, Rogge claimed, he was confident that he could find “evidence” in the German archives that the sedition trial defendants had been Nazi collaborators. However, according to historian Glen Jeansonne, no friend of the purported seditionists, “nothing Rogge found proved the existence of a conspiracy”⁸² between the German government and the defendants.

Undaunted, Rogge launched a nation wide lecture tour that was, not surprisingly, conducted under the auspices of B’nai B’rith. The combative and loquacious Rogge, prodded by his sponsors, could not contain himself in his enthusiastic recounting of the events of the trial and of the personalities involved and, in the end, was fired by the Justice Department on October 25, 1946, for leaking information to the press.⁸³ At that time Rogge was ordered to hand over all Justice Department and FBI documents in his possession. The Justice Department had apparently decided that Rogge had outlived his usefulness.

Less than a month later, District Judge Bolitha Laws dismissed the charges altogether, declaring that the defendants had not received a speedy trial as guaranteed by the Constitution. Although the Justice Department appealed, the dismissal was upheld on June 30, 1947 by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The “Great Sedition Trial” thus came to a close.

As even defendant Lawrence Dennis was moved to comment:

Some or all may even have been guilty of conspiring to undermine the loyalty of the armed forces, but not as charged by the [government] . . . Nothing in the evidence brought out during the trial proved or even suggested that any one of the defendants was ever guilty of any such conspiracy, except on the prosecution theory. And on that theory, opponents of President Roosevelt’s pre-Pearl Harbor foreign policy and steps in foreign affairs, such as Col. Lindbergh, Sen. Taft, Sen. Nye or Sen. Wheeler, and Col. McCormick, publisher of The Chicago Tribune, would be equally guilty.

Indeed, the prosecution case, according to the prosecution theory, would have been much stronger against these prominent isolationists than it ever could be against the less important defendants in the Sedition Trial.⁸⁴ 

Many years later it is grimly amusing to note that organized Jewish groups and Jewish newspapers attacked the attorney general, Francis Biddle, for having failed to see the sedition trial through to the bitter end and achieve the conviction of the defendants. Lawrence Dennis wryly commented that all of this showed a great deal of ingratitude on their part.           

According to Dennis: “It shows what a public servant gets for attempting to do dirty work to the satisfaction of minority pressure groups. Biddle did the best anyone in his position could do to carry out the wishes of the people behind the trial. They simply did not appreciate the difficulties of railroading to jail their political enemies without evidence of any acts in violation of the law.”⁸⁵

Dennis added a further warning for those who would allow themselves to be caught up in promoting “show trials” such as that which was effected in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944: “What the government does today to a crackpot, so-called,” Dennis said, “it may do to an elder statesman of the opposition the day after tomorrow.⁸⁶

“The trial made history,” Dennis said, ”but not as the government had planned. It made history as a government experiment, which went wrong. It was a Department of Justice experiment in imitation of a Moscow political propaganda trial.”⁸⁷

There are at least five definitive conclusions which can be drawn about this trial, based upon all that is in the historical record:

1) The defendants charged were largely on trial for having expressed views that were either anti-Jewish or anti-communist or both. The actions of the defendants had little or nothing to do with encouragement of dissension or insurrection within the U.S. armed forces. In short, the “sedition” trial was a fraud from the start.

2) The prime movers behind the prosecution were private special interest groups representing powerful Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith that were closely allied with the Roosevelt regime in power.

3) As a consequence, high-level politicians (including the U.S. president) and bureaucrats beholden to those private interests used their influence to ensure that the police powers of the government were used to advance the demands of those private pressure groups agitating for the sedition trial.

4) Major media voices (such as The Washington Post), working with the ADL and allied with the ruling regime, were prime players in promoting and facilitating the events that led to the trial.

5) The police powers of government can easily be abused, and innocent citizens, despite Constitutional guarantees of protection, can be persecuted under color of law, their innocence notwithstanding.

About a decade after “The Great Sedition Trial” had come to a close, the major media in America began devoting much energy to denouncing so-called anti-communist “witch-hunts” by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and others, the media (not to mention “mainstream” historians) never drew the obvious parallel with the precedent for such witch-hunting that had been set by the activities of the ADL and its allies in the Roosevelt administration who had orchestrated the sedition trial.

The events of “The Great Sedition Trial” are a black page of American history (and little known at that). Civil libertarians should take note: It can happen here, and it did.

Source: http://www.barnesreview.org/1944sedtrial.htm

The role of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith in prompting the FBI's recent Project Megiddo report on potential Y2K "terrorism" has a frightening precedent in American history. This was the topic discussed on the Nov. 14 broadcast of The SPOTLIGHT's weekly call-in talk forum, Radio Free America, with host Tom Valentine.

Valentine's guest was SPOTLIGHT correspondent Michael Collins Piper, author of an article on "The Great Sedition Trial of 1944" in the January-February issue of the revisionist history magazine, The Barnes Review.

Piper described the little-known story of the criminal trial in which 30 Americans were tried on trumped-up charges of "sedition" brought by the Justice Department of President Franklin D. Roosevelt against his critics. The evidence shows that it was the ADL that actually provided the FBI the "evidence" used to bring the false charges against the defendants.

Today, the ongoing attacks against presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan bear a striking similarity to the attacks made against the so-called "seditionists" in 1944.

What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. Valentine's questions appear in boldface. Piper's responses are in regular text.

Few Americans have heard about the Great Sedition Trial of 1944.

You always hear about "McCarthyism" in high school, but you never hear about the sedition trial. The way history books describe World War II you would never know that 90 percent of the American people opposed getting involved in that war in the first place.

The Great Sedition Trial took place 55 years ago, but it is very applicable to what is happening today.

What we are seeing today with the attacks on Pat Buchanan in the press, but also with this Project Megiddo report issued by the FBI, is a reflection of the same mindset that led to the Great Sedition Trial.

 Judge Bolitha Laws called the Great Sedition Trial a "travesty on justice."

 That's right. Although the trial came to a halt in 1944, there were repeated attempts by the Justice Department to enter new indictments but the charges were ultimately thrown out. There were originally three indictments involving some 40 people but 30 people actually went to trial.

The case was brought under the guise of accusing these people of supposedly attempting to disrupt the military and undermine the war effort. In fact, the bottom line was that the one thing that all of these people had done was to criticize the role of the Jewish lobby in pushing for U.S. involvement in the war. They also attacked the numerous communists in the Roosevelt administration (many of whom, in fact, were Jewish.)

That's really why they were indicted. That's what the Great Sedition Trial was really all about. Sedition had nothing to do with it. What they were indicted for is what Pat Buchanan is being attacked for doing—criticizing the power of the Jewish lobby.

There is firm evidence the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith was the prime mover behind the FBI in the trial.

No question about it. In fact, one of the defendants, David Baxter, later went through the Freedom of Information Act and got the files that resulted in his indictment. He found that in a great many cases it was not the FBI that had conducted the investigation—it was the ADL. The FBI merely received the reports ADL investigators had prepared.

"One can hardly tell from the reports," Baxter said, "whether a given person is an FBI or an ADL agent. But at the time all of this was so hush-hush that I didn't expect the web-spinning going on around me. I hadn't considered myself that important."

It's a shame that Americans didn't learn a lesson in 1944 in regard to the ADL's role in feeding disinformation to the FBI (and the FBI willingly accepting it at face value). Using this same technique, the ADL stirred up the mindset that created Waco and Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma bombing and now they are behind this Project Megiddo report.

 A reporter from The Washington Post played a key role in the scheme by the ADL and the Justice Department.

 That's right. The defendants in the Great Sedition Trial were from all over the country, so the only way they could indict them was to link them to Washington, D.C., in order to get jurisdiction over them.

What happened was that this writer for The Washington Post named Dillard Stokes sent letters to the defendants asking them to send literature to him in Washington. His letters were written under an alias, "Jefferson Breem" (to hide his identity as a Post reporter) and the defendants responded as the ADL hoped.

On that basis, then, the Justice Department said: "Okay, their conspiratorial activities extended into the District of Columbia so therefore we can file charges against them here." And they did. The third and final indictment actually went to trial, charging these defendants with interfering with the war effort.

These people had been critics of FDR's efforts to get us into the war and they were critics of the U.S. wartime alliance with communist Russia, concerned that the Roosevelt administration was rife with Soviet agents during World War II, which indeed it was.

These people targeted by the ADL were dragged from their homes and brought to Washington to stand trial. Few of them had any money to defend themselves. Many of them were destitute and hardly influential at all.

That's what's so frightening. It could happen again today. Let's take the case of Pat Buchanan. He's probably the most prominent person today who reflects the America First sentiment, the very views of those who were put on trial in 1944.

People get nervous when I start talking about Israel, so let me put things in another context that won't scare as many people. Let's take the war on Serbia instead. Pat Buchanan opposed that war. A lot of people opposed that war. The SPOTLIGHT opposed that war. There were American troops in that war.

Under the same theory used to indict the sedition trial, Pat Buchanan and others could have been indicted because they were conspiring to undermine the war effort.

In the earlier Gulf War, Israel was our ally and it could have been alleged that Buchanan was attacking our ally by opposing the Gulf War just as in the sedition trial it was alleged the defendants were attacking "our great Soviet ally."

In the trial in 1944, the people charged had expressed views that were anti-Jewish or anti-communist or both. They weren't seditionists.

 The irony is that these people were indicted under a law designed to crack down on Soviet agents in the United States.

That's correct. The Smith Act of 1940 was passed to prevent communist infiltration of the American armed forces and many of the people indicted had actually called for enactment of the Smith Act in the first place.

In the sedition trial, the government was saying that since Soviet Russia was the war-time ally of the United States, if you said anything about communist Russia you were opposing our ally and that this was "sedition."

 FDR's own attorney general, Francis Biddle, didn't even want to bring these indictments.

 That's correct. However, FDR was pushing for it. The ADL was lobbying heavily behind the scenes. It was a fait accompli. The poor attorney general didn't have much choice.

 The lives of these innocent people were very much disrupted by these criminal charges. Describe what happened to Elmer Garner.

 Mr. Garner was 82 years old and he died one week after the trial opened, with 40 cents in his pocket, staying in a tiny rented room in a flophouse in Washington. He was found slumped over his typewriter, working on his defense. They shipped his body home to Kansas in a wooden box.

 Ironically, Elmer was a first cousin of FDR's two-term Vice President John Nance Garner of Texas. Old Mr. Garner's family was made destitute because of this. This old gentleman published a newsletter that hardly anyone read, but he was indicted and accused of trying to undermine the military.

Another defendant, Col. Eugene Sanctuary, was 73 years old. He and his wife had run the Presbyterian Church's foreign mission and he had written hymns and patriotic songs. In 1942, right before he was indicted, he had just published a song called "Uncle Sam, We Are Standing By You." That sounds really seditious to me.

Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling's son, Kirkpatrick, was in the U.S. Army and was actually promoted while his mother was under indictment. At the same time, publicist George Sylvester Viereck, another defendant, had a son killed in action as a U.S. soldier, while his father was sitting in jail, accused of trying to undermine the armed forces.

Another defendant, Frank Clark, was a highly decorated veteran of World War I, wounded eight times in action, and in the 1920s was an organizer of the World War I veteran's Bonus March to Washington, lobbying for veterans' bonuses.

As another defendant, Lawrence Dennis (a personal friend of The SPOTLIGHT's executive publisher Willis Carto) later said, it was possible that some of the defendants had taken action, in some way, designed to undermine the armed forces. However, the government charged that all of these defendants, working together, had conspired to under mine the armed forces. In fact, most of these defendants didn't even know each other.

 In addition, they were also charged with conspiring with Adolf Hitler.

Oh yes. This sedition trial was really a "black comedy." But it was tragic in so many ways. If Pat Buchanan had been speaking out in 1942-1944 as he is today, Buchanan would have been in line to be indicted.

Media reports today uniformly say, in shocked voices: "Why that Pat Buchan an sounds just like the America First Committee (AFC) prior to World War II. He says we shouldn't have fought Hitler. Isn't that shocking?" The ADL is "troubled" about this. They're always "troubled" about something.

Buchanan is saying precisely what a large majority of Americans believed then. Keep in mind the names of some of those who were supporting the AFC and whose own views reflected the views of those who were indicted in the sedition trial:

 John F. Kennedy, then a student at Harvard, gave a $100 contribution to the AFC. His brother Joe, who was later killed in the service, was a supporter, too.

 Gerald Ford, as a student at Yale, was an AFC supporter.

We know other big names such as Col. Charles Lindbergh, Gen. Hugh Johnson, Gen. Robert Wood (another friend of Willis Carto's). Big names from Congress, Republican and Democrat alike, "right wing" and "left wing." They were allied on the premise that the United States had no business getting involved in the war.

Those who were actually charged, though, with "sedition" were outspoken pamphleteers, newspaper and newsletter publishers, radio broadcasters.

They didn't bring Sens. Robert Taft, William Langer, Burton Wheeler or other big names to trial.

That's what was actually very clever about the way they orchestrated the Great Sedition Trial. FDR knew that he could not get away with indicting members of Congress, who had actually done things a lot more indictable than many of those who were indicted.

Elizabeth Dilling was indicted for reprinting a speech by Rep. Clare Hoffman (R-Mich.) on the floor of Congress. That's Orwellian.

I would call it Talmudic. You see, the sedition trial was designed to frighten the large majority of the population. The people indicted were outspoken people who wrote and spoke out in public forums. The real purpose of the trial was to warn the large number of Americans who agreed with the views of those who were indicted that if they, too, spoke out, they could also be indicted. The indictments were designed to frighten the great "silent majority" out there.

Fortunately, though, the members of Congress who were not indicted (but who could have been indicted) did not back off and attacked the sedition trial. To his credit, North Dakota's Sen. William Langer demonstrated his contempt for the Justice Department and the ADL by purposefully coming to the U.S. Courthouse each day to escort Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling in and out of the courtroom.

A major villain of the Great Sedition Trial was the Justice Department prosecutor, O. John Rogge.

Rogge went at it with a vengeance. He had visited communist Russia and was a friend of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. In Russia he laid a wreath on the grave of a founder of the Communist Party USA. He was later the attorney for David Greenglass, the atomic spy who saved his own life by turning states' evidence against his own sister and brother-in-law, the Rosenbergs, who most deservedly went to the electric chair.

The way the trial came to an end was because the judge died. At that point the defendants agreed that they would ask for a mistrial. A mistrial was declared, although Rogge continued to push for a new trial.

However, the war came to an end and FDR died. Although Rogge claimed he would be able to find evidence in the captured German archives that would prove the defendants had been conspiring with the Nazis, he never did.

While trying to revive the trial, Rogge went on a lecture tour paid for by—you guessed it—the ADL. That's how close he was to the ADL. However, in 1946, the Justice Department realized the case had gone far enough and Rogge was fired.

Afterward, Lawrence Dennis said that the ADL "simply did not appreciate the difficulties of railroading to jail their political enemies without evidence of any acts in violation of the law."

 There was a very interesting de fense attorney named Henry Klein who played a part in the trial.

 He was one of the most outspoken of the defense attorneys and he was Jewish. Some nervous types are probably thinking: "Well, what difference does that make?" That makes a difference because he was defending people who were accused of being anti-Jewish, and, in fact, many were. Nonetheless, Klein was concerned these people's liberties were being violated through this ADL police state operation.

He said in his opening statement: "We will prove that this persecution was instigated by so-called professional Jews who make a business of preying on other Jews by scaring them into the belief that their lives and property are in danger." He said the anti-Semitism charged in the indictment was a "racket run by racketeers for graft purposes." He was talking, of course, about the ADL.

 Famous broadcaster Walter Win chell played a major role in promoting the trial.

That's correct. Winchell was quite in fluential at that time and he was a front man for the ADL. Neil Gabler, a well-known Jewish-American writer, wrote a biography of Winchell and revealed that Arnold Forster, the head of the ADL's so-called "fact finding" division, actually drafted entire columns for Winchell and showed up at Winchell's station to edit his radio broadcasts.

Winchell was a conduit between the FBI and the ADL and provided the ADL's information to the FBI. But good patriotic Americans who heard Win chell's broadcasts about the so-called "seditionists" didn't know it was ADL propaganda wrapped in the American flag.

The ADL role behind the FBI in the sedition trial sounds like the role of the ADL in the FBI's Project Megiddo report.

The Project Megiddo report is basically a smear of a wide variety of groups, suggesting that when the calendar turns to 2000 that they are going to rise up and try to overthrow the government. The Nov. 15 issue of The SPOTLIGHT shows that Project Megiddo is no more than a re-write of materials originally put together by the ADL.

Now, as a consequence millions of Amer i cans are afraid when 2000 comes "hate groups" are going to be out in the streets trying to destroy America. (Actually, if truth be told, many of these "hate groups" are actually funded by the ADL and the FBI.)

The ADL's tone suggests the ADL hopes that there will be violence.

Well, it's been well documented that there have been various political groups that have committed violence but that the violence were prompted by agents sent into those groups by the FBI and the ADL. That's the problem. This gives the government itself the opportunity to crack down on freedom of expression in the name of combating "terrorism."

That raises this question: If we have violence at Y2K, how can we be sure the violence isn't being committed by an agent provocateur inside one of these groups?

By giving this kind of nonsense to the FBI that's now in Project Megiddo, which the FBI then parrots to the media and which the media then reports to the public, the ADL is creating public turmoil. It creates suspicion and drives wedges between people—between whites and blacks, between neighbors who know that the lady down the street is a militia member.

Don't forget that the character who heads the ADL's "fact-finding" division is Neil Herman, who recently retired from the FBI as head of the its "counterterrorism" division. He was also in charge of the FBI's investigation of the World Trade Center bombing. But Herman never reported what Jewish-American journalist Robert Friedman revealed in the Aug. 3, 1993, issue of The Village Voice: the likelihood that one of the Arabs involved in the bombing was more than likely a "mole" of Israel's Mossad.

Today the ADL and the FBI and the press are finding a Nazi or an anti-Semite or a Holocaust denier under every bed. You can't open up any major newspaper or, increasingly, any small town daily, without finding stories about "hate groups" and "the holocaust." It's a steady drumbeat. If Pat Buchanan's campaign picks up, we'll hear a lot more of it.

We just had the Bilderberg meeting here in Washington and Sandy Berger, the president's National Security advisor, spoke there. What Berger said was ominous. He said "it is urgent that in ternationalists find common ground around a common agenda of our own. We must learn to recognize when our beliefs are being threatened and we must defend them together."

That kind of language—using the term "threatened"—sounds somewhat paranoid. That's scary since this comes from the man who heads the National Security Agency of the United States and who controls the nation's spy mechanism that has access to our e-mails and our telephone calls and our fax ma chines. He's saying that—as he puts it "our beliefs," that the beliefs of the internationalists, the big banks, the ADL, all of these power blocs that make up the global elite—are, in his words, "being threatened" and "we must defend them together."

What does Berger have in mind when he says it is necessary to "defend" those beliefs? Does that include indicting people for sedition? Does that include increased spying on Americans? What does he mean?

Americans should never forget that their government and the North Atlantic Treaty Organiza-tion lied through their teeth repeatedly to justify the unjustified attack on Yugoslavia.

The attack, which was never authorized by the United Nations, was justified on "humanitarian grounds" to prevent a "human catastrophe" and "genocide." Why, those nasty old Serbs may have killed 100,000 Kosovars, U.S. politicians speculated. Finally, they seemed to accept the British estimate of 10,000 to 11,000 dead. The American press frenziedly reported these wild accusations and added their own.

Well, after months of being totally in control of Kosovo, guess how many bodies NATO has found? A tad more than 2,100. Some gravesites remain to be examined, but, because the worst were done first, the count isn't likely to go much higher.

Richard Gwyn, a columnist with The Toronto Star, was one of the first to report the discrepancy between NATO assertions and the evidence found so far. He cites a case in which NATO claimed that as many as 1,000 bodies had been dumped down a mine shaft. Then he reports that the International Criminal Tribunal reported the results of its investigation using Western forensic experts. How many bodies did they find in the mine shaft? Zero.

Like the soccer stadium at Pristina supposedly filled with Kosovar prisoners, according to our State Depart ment, the mine shaft was empty. There was no genocide. There was no human catastrophe. There was no second holocaust. It was all lies. Comparing a two-hour ride on a passenger train from Pristina to the border with World War II Jews being packed like sardines into cattle cars and shipped all the way across Europe was absurd on its face, but when the national press gets all lathered up in spreading propaganda, nothing is too absurd to report.

Now one might think that the American press, as it discovers it was lied to and used as a vehicle for propaganda, might be all over the story, exposing these lies and exaggerations. No, members of the press are using their typical tactic: When the facts refute their earlier stories, they simply lose interest in reporting it.

So you are probably unaware that, "under the protection of NATO," more than 100,000 Serbs have been forced out of Kosovo, and numerous Christian churches and monasteries have been destroyed or desecrated.

The kernel of the nut is that NATO lied to justify the attack, lied during the attack and lied about its intentions after the attack. Furthermore, NATO is denying aid to Yugoslavia on the grounds that Slobodan Milosevic is still in power, which is the pattern of U.S. and British behavior. After all, 500,000 Iraqi children have died because these toddlers refuse to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Imagine these kids not obeying the U.S. government.

In the first place, Milosevic was elected. Does NATO approve of democracy only when it likes the result of the vote? It seems so. In the second place, if there was no genocide, as there obviously was not, Milosevic is not a war criminal. It's true a lot of Serbs want to throw him out of office, but they are not mad at him for fighting to keep Yugoslavia intact. They are mad at him for losing the wars.

Apparently, though, Americans have become anesthetized to government lying. The American people are lied to all the time about all sorts of things, and it seems not to bother them. That is a sign of a dead society. We may not be a dead poets society, just a dead consumers society.

Oswald Spengler, in his Decline of the West (published in 1918), predicted the end of Western democracies in the 1990s. His timing might have been off a smidgen, but just a smidgen. In the meantime, chalk up Kosovo as one more example of the Big Lie about a genocide that never happened.

© 1999 King Features Syndicate 

No dictatorship can maintain its persecution and prosecution of its people without state police. The larger the dictatorship, the larger THE POLICE STATE. During the Third Reich, children were rewarded for ratting out their relatives to the government’s Gestapo. It is the very nature of the police state.

The nexus of Naziism and the New Naziism as we enter the new Millennium is based on information extracted by force, or given voluntarily, to the compilers of this data into computerized dossiers. The web of information is woven with the intention to identify and snare all those who oppose the Orwellian Oligarchy. When asked what he envisioned the future would be, Orwell’s character stated, “a black boot stomping on the face of humanity forever.” Have we now reached that point that the Hitlerian hobnail boot is ready to smash all resistance to tyranny?

Quadzillion bytes of information are now gathered in the Belly of the Beast. The cashist cartel that controls our currency and our commerce has compiled information on everything about us. Our living, our breathing. Our eating, sleeping, and dying habits are captured by the New Hitlers - in anticipation of the day it will be used against us.

In China, its Socialist System already snares those citizens who think ill of their Evilarchy. One protester who had already served time for talking openly about the Tiananmen terrorists was sentenced to “serve” in the Lao-Gai. He was re-arrested and sentenced again. His crime? Neglecting to report his thoughts to the police.

It’s obvious why Comrade Clinton and his Communazi nexus in the Council on Foreign Relations here are such strong supporters of the slave states. Billions of bucks go daily to the butchers of Beijing from the United States. The Gates of Troy have been opened by Bill’s buddies, giving the Communist killers the bombs and then the technology of terror to wage war against the world. In the most recent act of espionage coming out of Los Alamos, Attorney General Janet Reno refused to prosecute a Chinese man who had taken home classified nuclear secrets - the same secrets that wound up with their slave-state scientists. In spite of the fact he failed a lie detector test three times, ol’ Janet Reno refused to prosecute.

Why is all the information on US being compiled by the cashist cartel? To sell something? A new car, or the New Naziism, in a cashless Satanic society - where every person would be treated like a possession of the state ... and literally everyone would have a price on his or her head?

Dictatorships require dossiers to I.D. enemies of the state. From the KGB to the CIA, from the FBI to the Gestapo to the IRS, the massive collection of data for dossiers is necessary for the New Naziism. Loads of leftist laws are passed by our pink politicians to limit liberty - as we descend on down the steps towards the dungeons of dictatorship and despotism.

The military, FEMA, the NSA, the ISA, the CIA, the FBI, and every IGORIAN agency in the nation monitors our website here at the Alliance of the Free. We list but a small number of their weekly visits to monitor our fight for freedom. Obviously they are ordered by the Oligarchy of Evil to investigate our activities. Their goal - the establishment of a New World Order on the ashes of American society. The Globalist Goal of the One World Gargoylian Government is to spew the hot oils of the New Hitlerism upon the people who protest.

So why would the Anti-Defamation League be working for ONE WORLD? Was not Hitler’s dream a world dictatorship? Herr Hitler’s second book on the New World Order came after Mein Kampf. He talked of a police state, where all would be tracked from cradle to grave and monitored by their madmen.

We’ve heard rumor that the ADL, which supposedly operates independently from our government, has been gathering information on U.S. citizens and furnishing it to the FBI - to carry out investigations on individuals and organizations ‘‘they consider to be against the interests of Israel. But what they consider beneficial or detrimental to the interests of Israel is not necessarily that which is of benefit or of detriment to the U.S.

To the best of my recollection, the activities of a man named Pollard was not in the national interests of the United States any more than were the activities of Julian and Ethel Rosenberg beneficial to Israel when they furnished the Soviet Union (Israel’s arch-enemy) the secrets of how to make an atomic bomb.

One can understand why the Jewish Anti-Defamation League would want to investigate anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli individuals and organizations and expose them in the interests of the Jews. That’s what they were supposedly set up to do. But the ADL, according to the “Project Megiddo” story we are printing here, seems to be gathering info on individuals who are fighting the New Naziism.

If, in fact, the ADL is an ally to our enemies, then it is they who need to be monitored. If not, they need to be praised. It’s a hot topic, and we’ll leave that up to you to determine if they are legitimate in serving the interests of Jewish people, or simply serving as a front group for the American Illuminati. We offer the ADL the opportunity to print any rebuttal to this story they might have.

They can Email us at fwapost@HotMail.com .

Reproduced From: Free World Alliance
 

Credit is due to Michael Collins Piper, author of "Final Judgement" and Ken Hoop, for their prescient and excellent authorship in the historical journal, Barnes Review--hereafter B.R. The authors chronicle the scarcely known history of the sedition trials of 1944, ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to appease anti-American factions then spoiling for revolutionary changes in the nation.

Once again, just 56 years later, we find ourselves at the cusp of a great powerplay of antithetical forces, fighting to own the new millennium.  In uncanny repetition, the nation is held hostage as tens of millions of Americans are apparently set up for an unofficial pretrial investigation and the government ordered surveillance, by the Clinton administration. Notable, is how the unlawful use of governmental power, parallels dangerously with the charges that brought about the Sedition trials of 1944.  This paper attempts to second Michael Collins Piper and Ken Hoop, in sounding history's shrill siren, warning loudly that government malevolence might very well culminate in the severe persecution under the "color of law," of vast numbers of American citizens. These citizens' now unacceptable doctrines of faith, in the current political climate,  their dissent of the gross usurpation of power by their elected officials and shadow bureaucrats, their political thoughts, speeches and writings, even their private language, are now under microscopic scrutiny by the present administration.  These citizens are scrutinized by the FBI,  and by a foreign, unregistered, spying apparatus, a historical front for British intelligence, the ADL, and by their duly elected police chiefs, and various bodies of law enforcement, nationwide.

An American Jewish attorney and a staunch anti-communist, who represented one of the Sedition Trial defendants, laid out his defense this way:

"We will prove that this persecution and prosecution was undertaken to cover the crimes of government-remember that.  We will prove that it was undertaken by order of the president, in spite of the opposition of Attorney General Biddle.  We will prove that Mr. Rogge, [prosecutor, avowed communist, staunch friend of Stalin, spoke at Kremlin, ] was selected for this job of punishing these defendants because no one else in the Department of Justice felt that he could find sufficient grounds to spell out a crime against these defendants.  We will prove that the communists control not only our government, but our politics, our labor organizations, our agriculture, our mines, our industries, our war plants and our armed encampments.  We will prove that the law under which these defendants are being tried was enacted at the repeated demands of the heads of our armed forces to prevent communists from destroying the morale of our soldiers, sailors, marines and air forces [and that this prosecution] was undertaken to protect communists who were and are guilty of the very crimes charged against these defendants who are utterly innocent and have been made the victims of this law."  Lawrence Reilly, `The Sedition Case.'  (1985)

Klein told the jury that Zionist organizations, one of the foremost being the ADL, "were using the trial for their own ends":  "We will prove that this persecution was instigated by so-called professional Jews who make a business of preying on other Jews by scaring them into the belief that their lives and their property are in danger through threatened pogroms in the United States [and that] anti-Semitism charged in this so-called indictment, is a racket, that is being run by racketeers for graft purposes."

 The B. R. authors report that Attorney "Klein forcefully made the allegation that the FBI agents had been acting as "agents provocateurs, attempting to stir up acts of sedition:

"We will show that the most vicious written attack on Jews and on the Roosevelt administration emanated from the office of the FBI by one of its agents, and that the purpose of this attack was to provoke others to do likewise.  We will show that this agent also drilled his underlings in New York with broomsticks preparatory to "killing Jews." Lawrence Reilly, `The Sedition Case.'  (1985)

"We will show that large sums of Hitler money helped finance Mr. Roosevelt's re-election in 1936 and that right at this moment, British, American and German capital and industry are cooperating together in South America and other parts of the world."  `A Trial on Trial,' by St. George and Lawrence Dennis

What were the Sedition Trials really about?  Why have most people Americans not heard or in school been taught of them, and what today must Americans strive diligently to learn from them?

The B. R. journal chronicles `Noted historian, Elmer Barnes, its namesake, who was one of FDR's leading critics from the academic arena, who said the purpose of the Sedition Trial was to make the Roosevelt administration "seem opposed to fascism," when, in fact, the administration was pushing totalitarian policies.'
 
THEREIN LIES THE CRUX OF OUR PRESENT DILLEMA.  PROJECT MEGIDO is a device which seeks once again to oppose fascism in our day while, in fact, pursuing totalitarian policies.

History records with clarity that American resolve and freedom were severely impacted by the Roosevelt New Deal welfare and confiscatory policies, along with the new and  blatantly unconstitutional laws.  Our present records testify distinctly to the fact that the present Clinton administration is the polisher and finisher of all those ill omened policies and laws.

David Baxter, one of the defendants of the infamous trial, said that "Judges and lawyers alike will tell you the mass sedition trial of World War II will go down in legal history as one of the blackest marks on the record of American jurisprudence.  In the legal world, none can recall a case where so many Americans were brought to trial for political persecution and were so arrogantly denied the rights guaranteed an American citizen under the Constitution."

It was literally a Soviet-style show trial conducted in a kangaroo court. It "could have been a basis for a Hollywood comedy" were it not so serious.   World War II was looming, the air was filled with the passionate arguments of the America First folks who protested against the US entering the war.  On the other side of the argument, were the vociferous, public voices of internationalists, their stooges, foreign and domestic, and their managed press, who clamored for the US to join the war.

Roosevelt and his administration felt seriously threatened with these anti-war voices, with their various "alternative" meetings, their reminders to the nation of the lofty precepts of the nation.  They alerted the nation to the grave results if the US were to enter the war; he and his planners feared their pamphlets and their patriotic rallying for America First.  In the forties, people were not yet successfully indoctrinated into the mind paralyzing cult, the unmentionable taboo-cult of so-called,  "anti-Semitism."  Patriotic people were not put off with the embryonic cries of "anti-Semitism" which, they clearly saw as a ruse to silence them, nor were they faint to expose the destructive, communist influences rampant in the US government, Jew or non-Jew.   Patriots then straightforwardly protested against all un-American activities, whether by the corrupt Jewish money/media power or by the Protestant/Catholic communist dalliances or by the atheist or occult Eastern WASP establishment, which prevailed in all sectors of government and social institutions, including in the military.  It made no difference, as treason recognizes no special religious or ethnic loyalty.

The frenzy of Roosevelt and his Brain Trust approached paranoia  in their incapacity to halt the Constitutional liberties used by his opponents, including Congressional critics, to block his internationalist aims.

Finally, 42 activist American citizens and one newspaper were targeted for destruction.   Most of these Americans were some of the most ordinary people in the nation, with a sole distinguishing factor that set them apart: they were intelligent, informed, patriotic, and not easily intimidated and many, if not most, were devout Christians.  They ranged in ages from their thirties or forties, to over 80-years of age.  The B.R. gives some examples of the average "seditionist": a sign painter who was 80% deaf, a Detroit factory worker, a waiter and a maid.  At best , they were average Americans, without the means or the opportunity to be able to conduct the kind of sedition and internationally connected conspiracy that the government had charged, nor were they in any position to defend themselves against the unlimited resources of the central government.  In many cases, the defendants were paupers, virtually penniless.  Many of them were "one-man" publishers, reaching small audiences-hardly a threat to the mighty forces that controlled the New Deal" and its powerful media. Several were quite elderly, and of one, Senator William Langer (R-N.D.), an angry critic of the trial, described the victim in a speech on the floor of the Senate (9/8/44).  Garner, he said, was:

 "A little old gentleman of 83, almost stone deaf, with three great-grandchildren.  After he lost the mailing permit for his little weekly paper, he lived with his aged wife through small donations, keeping a goat and few chickens and raising vegetables on his small home plot. Held in the [Washington, D.C.] jail for several weeks, for lack of bond fees, and finally impoverished by three indictments and forced trips and stays in Washington, he died alone in a Washington rooming house early in this trial, with 40 cents in his pocket.  His body was shipped naked in a wooden box to his ailing, impoverished widow, his two suits and typewrite being held, so that clothing had to be purchased for his funeral.  That is one of the dangerous men about whom we have been hearing so much."

According to American Jewish attorney, Henry Klein, who defied the ADL, by boldly serving as defense counsel to this defendant too, "Garner-who was a first cousin of FDR's first vice president (1933-1941), John Nance Garner-died at his typewriter in a tiny room in a Washington flophouse, typing out his defense."  Reilly, p.75

He added, "Very few of the indictees even knew each other before the trial, despite the fact that the indictments charged them with being part of a grand conspiracy, orchestrated by Adolph Hitler, to undermine the morale of
the American military during wartime."

The handful of the more prominent and wealthy among them, were let go, for fear their influence would do more damage to the disingenuous trial,  while 30 remained to show the nation the example of what was in reality, a
totalitarian Soviet-style trial.  A trial staged exclusively to intimidate any voices, particularly, the ones in high places, who refused to tow the Rooseveltian, internationalist line.

B. R. recounts that three separate indictments occurred in July 21, 1942, and they came to an abrupt halt in 1944, when a mistrial was declared, upon the death of the presiding judge.  In 1946, Judge Bolitha Laws of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, dismissed the charges against the defendants, saying that to allow the case to continue would be a "a travesty on justice."

"It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who ordered the Justice Department investigation.  The Attorney General, Francis Biddle, (who opposed this blatantly political prosecution), followed the President's orders."

At this point, we must make important note of the fact that it was present Attorney General, Janet Reno, likewise faithfully followed her orders from the FBI, and their orders were taken from the highest echelon of government.  These orders sent the military apparatus to burn into oblivion, innocent American citizens at Waco, in cold blood.   But there
was more in the tangled Waco disaster: The  scheming "humanitarian lobby," the despotic, hateful, and anti-humanity ADL, was involved in "advising", read, rousing , inflaming, prejudicing, the various principals, precisely as it did in the Sedition Trials of 1944.   As Roosevelt's Attorney General faithfully fulfilled the misguided obligations of his job, so does
Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, in our present day, faithfully fulfill her own misguided orders.  This mischief of high treason and subversion,  against the people, is conducted with the aid and nurture of that identical mass media band roaring above the little voices, and with the exact same cheer leading of the anti-American ADL cabal.

But, the Sedition Trials' epic  becomes more twisted, as ours does this very day, in the times of PROJECT MEGIDDO.

Former defendant, Lawrence Dennis, says that "behind the scenes, there were other forces at work: the power brokers who dictated the overall grand design of the Roosevelt administration and its foreign and domestic polities."   Lawrence Dennis, author, diplomat, outspoken critic of both the domestic and foreign policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was among the more prominent and influential of the defendants.  In his and his co-author's work, Trial on Trial, he dissects the fraud that the trial represented.  "The three prime movers behind the trial were extreme leftists, organized Jewish groups, and internationalists in general, all of who were loud and persistent advocates of the trial, editorializing in favor of the investigation and indictments in their newspapers and through media voices such as radio personality, Walter Winchell."

 In a caption in the Barnes Review, "What the American people did not know, is that Walter Winchell was the pawn of one Arnold Forster, the New York counsel and chief "fact finder" for the ADL of B'nai Brith, which, itself, was a very public supporter of the sedition trial.  Winchell, according to his biographer, Neal Gabler, acted as the ADL's conduit to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, providing the ADL's "facts" to the FBI that were used in the prosecution of the alleged seditionists.

Author, Dennis, stated unequivocally, "One of  the most important Jewish organizations behind the sedition trial was the B'nai B'rith adjunct known as the Anti-Defamation League or ADL.  Getting the federal government to stage such a trial, like getting America into the war, was a `must' on the agenda of the fighters against isolationism and anti-Semitism.  What the people behind the trial wanted to have judicially certified to the world was that anti-Semitism is a Nazi idea and that anyone holding this idea is a Nazi, who is thereby violating the law-in this instance, by causing
insubordination in the armed forces-through his belief in or advocacy of this idea."

David Baxter another defendant, pointed out in his book, `The Great Sedition Trial of 1944,' that a United Press report published in 1943 said: "Under pressure from Jewish organizations, to judge from articles appearing in publications put out by Jews for Jews, the [indictment]…was drawn to include criticisms of Jews as "sedition."  It appeared that a main purpose of the whole procedure, along with outlawing unfavorable comments on the administration, was to set a legal precedent of judicial interpretations and sever penalties which would serve to exempt Jews in America from all
public mention except praise, in contrast to the traditional American viewpoint which holds that all who take part in public affairs must be ready to accept full, free public discussion, either pro or con.  In a word, the sedition trial as politics was smart.  It was good politics."

Later, comments the B. R., "Baxter found that certain Jewish groups, specifically the ADL, had been prime movers behind the Justice Department investigation that resulted in the indictments of the defendants in the sedition trial."  He wrote: I demanded, through the Freedom of Information Act, that the FBI turn over to me its investigation records of my
activities during the early 1940s leading up to the Sedition Trial.  I learned that the investigation had extended over several years and covered hundreds of pages….  The FBI blocked out the names of those who had given information about me, much of it as false as anything could be.  I was never given a chance to face these people and make them prove their accusations.  Yet everything they said went into the investigation records.  Oddly enough, in a great many cases, it wasn't the FBI that conducted the investigation, but the Anti-Defamation League, with the FBI merely
receiving the reports of the ADL investigators.  One can hardly tell from the reports whether a given person was an FBI or an ADL agent.  But at the time all this was so hush-hush that I didn't even suspect the web-spinning going on around me.  I hadn't considered myself that important."
 
Commenting on the way that the FBI had been manipulated by the ADL, Lawrence Dennis pointed out: "The FBI, like the atomic bomb and so many other useful and dangerous tools, is an instrument around the use of which new safeguards against abuse by unscrupulous interests must soon be created."

But the lessons have been lost to history.  The FBI, in gross conflict of interest, continues to be a tool of the ADL, or, one can only assume that the agency exists in a symbiotic relationship with it.  To wit: The ADL's role as advisor, even counsel, to the FBI and Justice Dept, when the ADL is in truth the arch instigator in its roles in the holocaust at Waco and the blatantly criminal murders at Ruby Ridge of the Weaver family members.  The ADL also played a documented role in the Oklahoma City bombing with its unanswered questions and corrupt FBI lab tests, etc.

Some exceedingly important questions must be raised, loudly, and very soon.  These questions beg a long overdue answer: Why today aren't the peoples' representatives and law enforcement agencies asking who the ADL are.  Why
does the ADL have this quasi-proprietary status with the FBI and our policing leaders and forces.  What specializes them to train many of our police officers in so many cities.  Is the ADL a domestic law enforcement agency?   Where is their charter and why are they allowed to favor some members of the public over others.  Why do the members of this secretive organization operate as counter intelligence agents, especially dealing with dirty tricks and pernicious entrapment.  WHO GIVES THE RIGHT.  What gives them authority to finger whole segments of society as potential
terrorists.  Why do they operate unencumbered, particularly when targeting Christians and groups in general, whose beliefs they do not approve of. What about the ADL's long role in treasonous, dualistic loyalties, going as far back as the founding of this nation, operating under another name.  Why is the ADL exempt from "religious" entanglements and yet still sanctioned by offices of our government, as a civil rights expert and counsel.  B'nai Brith is the Jewish branch of Scottish Free Masonry, whose mystical philosophies and oaths are anti-American, occult and anti-humanity.  The ADL has proven themselves to be a "civil rights" fraud.  They are a seditious and racist terrorist cabal.  They have been caught in numerous spy scandals and many cases of malfeasance.  To those who have studied this evil group of supposed citizen activists, one will eventually conclude that the ADL is anti-Jewish to the very core of its tainted soul.  All its "revealing" papers and actions in fact invite the less knowing to harbor anti-Jewish prejudice: anti-Semitism, they wail and cry but, in utter mockery and unparalleled disdain.

If the subversion of this nation is to stop, these questions must be asked and answers must be demanded.  Many of the same questions must fittingly be asked of other anti-American operators, like Morris Dees of the comically  misnomered Southern Poverty Law Center, or about the Jewish Defense League, which until recently, was declared a terrorist group by the U.S. State Dept.  For the sake of brevity, further discussion on the ADL and comrades in subversion, is not within the scope of this paper.  In the end, evidence demonstrates clearly that such cynical groups exist to encourage opposing groups, which are programmed to battle with each other, keeping the nation divided.  There is evidence to prove that the ADL and similar militant and always un-American groups, are pawns of the mind bending Tavistock Institute and its collaborating institutions, in Germany and the U.S.

In an example of entrapments to bring a halt to the activities of people who protest liberal policies and want a return to the nation's roots, ironically, the enemies of Freedom and the agents of subversion, have long experience.
 
Historian Roger Roots in his chronicle of Senator Burton Wheller and other members of Montana's Congressional delegation, "who opposed the Roosevelt administration's war in Europe," reports  that:  "The Jewish owned  Washington Post assisted in the detective work of the Justice Department from the beginning.  Dillard Stokes, the [Post] columnist who was most conspicuous in his insider reporting of the sedition grand jury proceedings, actually became part of the Justice Department's case against the isolationists when he wrote requests to numerous of the defendants to send their literature to him under an assembled name.  It was this that allowed defendants to be brought from the farthest reaches of the country into the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C."

Senator Robert A. Taft spoke out strongly against the indictment: "I am deeply alarmed by the growing tendency to smear loyal citizens who are critical of the national administration and of the conduct of the war. Something very close to fanaticism exists in certain circles.  I cannot understand it-cannot grasp it.  But I am sure of this: Freedom of speech
itself is at stake, unless the general methods pursued by the Department of Justice are changed."  Barnes Review reports  that "Taft noted that the indictment, in his words, was `adroitly drawn' and said it claimed that groups such as the Coalition of Patriotic Societies, were linked to the accused conspirators.  The Coalition, Taft noted, included among its member organizations such groups as the Descendants of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, the General Society of Mayflower Descendants and the Sons of the American Revolution, among others.   ` On the basis of the way in which the indictment was written, Taft said, `a considerable number of members of both the House and Senate could also be indicted, along with a considerable number of the nation's newspaper editors.'"

Dennis summarized, "the first indictment charged conspiracy to violate the seditious propaganda section of both the wartime Espionage act of 1917 and the peacetime Smith Act of 1940, also called the Alien Registration Act. This indictment…was that the defendants had conspired to spread Nazi propaganda for the purpose of violating the just mentioned laws.  The government case consisted of showing the similarity between the propaganda themes of the Nazis and the defendants."  But, Dennis added, "for a conviction on such an indictment to stand under the law, it is necessary to prove similarity of intent of the persons accused rather than similarity of content of what they said.  The weaknesses of these first two indictments were that they fitted neither the law nor the evidence.  The government's
difficulty was that, to please the people behind the trial, [ADL et al] it had had to indict persons whose only crime was isolationism, anti-Semitism and anti-communism, when there was no law on the statute books against these 'isms.'  No evidence for the charges existed, in any of the indictments, the indictments were unlawful."  "They were thrown out due to absence of evidence for conviction, among other serious flaws."

In the end, this whole charade was nothing but a show trial, meant to silence and intimidate any Roosevelt administration critics.  Critics were to be dealt with any and all strong arm tactics, no matter how unlawful,  that were dared at the time.  "Despite all the determined efforts of the Justice Department and its allies in the ADL and at the Washington Post," the enemy of freedom though empowered, failed at that time to suppress free speech, though it required great personal sacrifice on the part of those defendants to stand their ground, to protect that hard won right.

Today, that threat has raised again its forked tongue and double mind, publicly, and in raw defiance.  Today, we who stubbornly insist on our traditional self determination, our right to freedom of that particular founding faith, and that special free speech to express also our dissent of the status quo, find ourselves seriously threatened.  The enemy has not changed his stripes.  He has merely grown bolder because the citizenry continues to largely ignore his growing record of power usurpation and  "in your face" treason.

The journal reports that according to Dennis, " it was the design of the sedition trial to target not the big-name critics of the Roosevelt war policies, but instead to use the publicity surrounding the trial to frighten the vast numbers of potential grass-roots critics of the intervention in the Eurasian war into silence, essentially showing them that, they, too, could end up in the dock if they were to dare to speak out as the defendants had in opposition to the administration'' policies."

We can not afford again today, to mistake or miss history's clear lessons. To do so is to risk self incrimination with just cause and the correct charge of `fool.'  It is the task of the same enemies of mankind, to accomplish the same totalitarian suppression and offensive, using the PROJECT MEGIDDO program, this time, but with old rudely selective "enemies" hit list.  Tens of millions of people are now branded crackpots, the rebels and terrorists of the day.  It is the design of PROJECT MEGIDDO to charge and indight extra-judicially and unconstitutionally, a massive  segment of
politically incorrect citizenry, as their undesired religious beliefs and their unwelcome political dissent, are resolutely not fit for a planned society.  PROJECT MEGIDDO's clear message is about obliterating via suffocation of its voice, basic Christian doctrine, thereby stifling the very existence of Christian dogma and practice.  Why?  Because the most
fundamental Christian doctrine in its unaltered purity, is not conducive to the cultural, spiritual and political environment of the new age in which we live.   Unpolluted Christianity and Christendom, can not, by dint of their exclusionist nature, fit in with the studiously and devotedly packaged set of new age mores, beliefs, and practices, of the planned era of revised idealism.  Thus, it makes sense that the modern architects of society would consider Christianity a dogma of subversion itself-subversive to the much acclaimed new world order.   Basic Christianity prohibits unjust war, teaches against the sins of abortion/infanticide, homosexuality, adultery, false worship, wicked kings/governments, one-world
government, which, it explains, are elements that make for actual world disorder and are inherently evil all.   To clarify lest it still be missed: it is "unpaganized" Christianity which forms the greatest opposition to world government elitists and their desire for the new ways of new world utopia.  An utopia, where a new form of brave new government             attempts to order the worldwide religion and the universal behavior befitting all global citizens--in particular, those stubborn Americans who still dare to think they are individualists.  In the same manner, the absolutist design of PROJECT MEGIDDO, equally aims to silence those grassroots patriotic citizens, the "crackpots" as the media during the sedition trials called them, who, Christian or not, are as vocal as their forties' counterparts, in raising their voices loudly and widely in the land, among their fellow citizens.  These citizens see it indeed as their duty no differently than
did their 40' predecessors, and in similar New Deal response, the Third Way opponents pronounce it anathema to the establishment of the Great Plan of The Ages.  The new New Deal informs that it aims to succeed  this time, in
spite of the oft repeated, but too oft neglected, testimony of the ages, which forever testifies to the futility of the goal.

The main point of bringing up at this time the 1944 Sedition Trial of great infamy, is to point out how similarly the events are unfolding today.  The schemers of PROJECT MEGIDDO hail from the same school of high subversion. The persecutors and accusers, are identical but more lethal due to honed skills and potentially subversive technology of mass control.  The FBI, ADL, The Justice Department, the US administration, the accepted  media, the abdicated representatives of the people, all betray the nation, in deliberate and studious subversion of the rule of law and order. The main problem today strikingly lacking from the era of the forties, is that the caliber of many people then was superior, unlike our day of monumental apathy and depravity.  A great sense of outrage at injustice existed even from many practitioners of jurisprudence, some members of Congress/Senate, and finally, even the media saw fit to relent.

 For example, another defense attorney, James Laughlin, (a public defender representing one Ernest Elmhurst) created quite a stir when he declared in open court, "that it would be impossible for the trial to continue unless the private files of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith could be impounded and introduced as evidence."  Barnes Review continues, "it was clear that much of the prosecution was based on the ADL's "fact finding" and Laughlin concluded that it would be necessary to determine precisely what the ADL had provided the government if the defendants would be able to put on an effective defense."  As Reilly summarized the situation: "Laughlin had placed the spotlight upon the big secret of the case.  This was a bomb, which, some have said, had more to do with demoralizing [the prosecution's ] case than any other single [factor].  The press reversed itself thereafter and the "crackpots" suddenly were normal humans again."

In conclusion, heed this echo from the past.  It still keeps in good standing.  They are the words that express that particular human inspiration and determination, which pine to remove the shackles of oppressive oligarchs.  It is that enthusiasm for individual liberty and expression, that made the U.S. the nation set apart from all others in all the annals of history.

Lawrence Dennis, defendant at "The Great Sedition Trial, expresses it:

Wrote Dennis:

The crackpots, so-called, or the agitators, are never intimidated by sedition trials.  The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

The people who are intimidated by sedition trials are the people who have not enough courage or enough indiscretion ever to say or do anything that would get them involved in a sedition trial.  And it is mainly for the purpose of intimidating these more prudent citizens that sedition trials are held…

A government seeking to suppress certain dangerous ideas and tendencies and certain types of feared opposition will not, if its leadera are smart, inidct men like Col. [Charles] Lindbergh or Senators [Burton] Wheeler [D-Mont.], [Robert] Taft [R-Ohio] and Gerald Nye [R-N.D.], who did far more along the line of helping the Nazis by opposing Roosevelt's foreign policy as charged against the defendants than any of the defendants.

The chances of conviction would be nil, and the cry of persecution would resound throughout the land.

It is the weak, obscure and indiscreet who are singled out by an astute politician for a legalized witch-hunt.  The political purposes of intimidating the more cautious and respectable is best served in this country by picking for a trick indictment and a propaganda mass trial that most vulnerable rather than the most dangerous critics; the poorest rather than the richest; the least popular rather than the most popular;  the last rather than the most impor5tan and influential.

This is the smart way to get at the more influential and the more dangerous.  The latter see what is done to the less influential and less important, and they govern themselves accordingly.  The chances of convicting the weaker are better than of convicting the stronger…"
 

Written on the day of our Lord, November 7th, 1999, by Angie Carlson.

Feel free to post this document on your websites and to distribute unaltered as the spirit dictates.

Reproduced From: Free World Alliance

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